Who's who · Chips & compute
Google Cloud TPU
Google's custom AI chips, used for Gemini and rented to others through Google Cloud
At a glance
- Founded
- 2015
- Based in
- Sunnyvale, United States
- People
- Amin Vahdat, Senior vice president and chief technologist, AI and infrastructure; Mark Lohmeyer, Vice president and general manager, AI and computing infrastructure
- Known for
- TPU 8t, TPU 8i, Ironwood
- Funding
- Part of Google Cloud (Alphabet; NASDAQ GOOGL)
- Parent
- Google Cloud, Alphabet
- Website
- https://cloud.google.com/tpu
Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) are Google's own chips for training and running AI models. Google uses them for its Gemini models and rents them to other companies through Google Cloud as part of its AI Hypercomputer, alongside NVIDIA GPUs and its own Arm-based Axion CPUs.
Google built its first TPU in 2015. The seventh generation, Ironwood, was announced for general availability in November 2025 and scales to 9,216 chips in one superpod, a group of chips linked to work as a single system. In April 2026 Google announced an eighth generation made up of two chips: TPU 8t for training, which links 9,600 chips in a superpod with 121 exaflops of compute, and TPU 8i for low-latency inference, which Google says gives 80% better performance per dollar than the previous generation. Google said both would be generally available later in 2026. They support JAX, PyTorch, SGLang and vLLM.
Outside companies also use TPUs. In late 2025 Anthropic said it planned to access up to one million TPUs, and in April 2026 it expanded its use to multiple gigawatts of capacity coming online from 2027, partly supplied through Broadcom. Other named users include Citadel Securities, Lightricks and Essential AI.
Sources
- Google Cloud, Ironwood TPUs and new Axion-based VMs for your AI workloads, 2025-11-07
- Google, Our eighth generation TPUs: two chips for the agentic era, 2026-04-22
- Google Cloud, AI infrastructure at Next '26, 2026-04-23
- Google Cloud Press Corner, Anthropic expands use of Google Cloud and TPUs, 2026-04-06
Facts last checked 2026-10-02