Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California. Credit: Alban on Unsplash Google is introducing two new versions of its in-house AI chips, known as tensor processing units (TPUs), Bloomberg News reported on Monday. The chips are called the TPU 8tx and the TPU 8i Max. Amin Vahdat, Google’s chief technologist for AI infrastructure, told Bloomberg they are reworked versions of existing chips, built for workloads that customers had asked for.
The 8tx is designed for secure and confidential work used by government agencies and companies in regulated industries. It runs alongside chips from AMD as part of a partnership between the two companies, according to Bloomberg’s report. The 8i Max, by contrast, is built for AI applications that need long context windows. That means they can take in very large amounts of text or data in a single request.
Both are based on Google’s eighth-generation chips, the TPU 8t and TPU 8i, which the company unveiled at its Cloud Next event in April. The 8t is built to train AI models, while the 8i runs them once they are trained. Google said both would be generally available later this year. Google used to release one new AI processor every two years, according to Bloomberg.
This year it launched two at once, and the new variants take the eighth-generation line to four chips. Vahdat said each one is tuned for different needs. Google first built TPUs for its own use. They have since become one of the main alternatives to Nvidia’s graphics processors, which dominate AI computing.
Google rents out TPUs through its cloud business rather than selling them as standalone chips. Anthropic agreed last year to use up to 1 million of them. The company is also widening its chip supply chain. It works with four design partners, including Broadcom and MediaTek, to build its TPUs.
According to Bloomberg, the new variants are meant to serve an industry that is moving towards AI agents. These are AI tools that carry out tasks on a user’s behalf. At the same time, companies face growing security risks as they put such tools to work. Get the TNW newsletter ✕ Close Get the TNW newsletter Get the most important tech news in your inbox each week.
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