Google unveils Ironwood, its most powerful AI processor yet

Google has unveiled a new AI processor, the seventh generation of its custom TPU architecture. The chip, known as Ironwood, was reportedly designed for the emerging needs of Google’s most powerful Gemini models, like simulated reasoning, which Google prefers to call “thinking.” The company claims this chip represents a major shift that will unlock more powerful agentic AI capabilities. Google calls this the “age of inference.”

Whenever Google talks about the capabilities of a new Gemini version, it notes that the model’s capabilities are tied not only to the code but to Google’s infrastructure. Its custom AI hardware is a key element of accelerating inference and expanding context windows. With Ironwood, Google says it has its most scalable and powerful TPU yet, which will allow AI to act on behalf of a user to proactively gather data and generate outputs. This is what Google means when it talks about agentic AI.

Ironwood delivers higher throughput compared to previous Google Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), and Google really plans to pack these chips in. Ironwood is designed to operate in clusters of up to 9,216 liquid-cooled chips, which will communicate directly with each other through a newly enhanced Inter-Chip Interconnect (ICI).

Google says this design will be a boon not only for its own Gemini models but also to developers looking to run AI projects in the cloud. Developers will be able to leverage Ironwood in two different configurations: a 256-chip server or the full-size 9,216-chip cluster.