Google Cloud Launches Ironwood TPUs and Axion VMs to Power the Age of Inference

Google Cloud

Google Cloud has announced the general availability of Ironwood TPUs, its seventh-generation Tensor Processing Units, and new Axion VMs, marking a major leap in AI infrastructure performance and efficiency. Ironwood, designed for high-demand workloads such as large-scale model training and low-latency inference, delivers 10x higher peak performance than TPU v5p and 4x greater efficiency than TPU v6e, positioning it as Google’s most powerful and energy-efficient silicon to date. Early adopters like Anthropic, Lightricks, and Essential AI are leveraging Ironwood to scale advanced AI models and enhance generative capabilities.

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ā€œIronwood’s improvements in both inference performance and training scalability will help us scale efficiently while maintaining the speed and reliability our customers expect,ā€ said James Bradbury, Head of Compute at Anthropic. Complementing Ironwood, Google unveiled Arm-based Axion instances—N4A, offering up to 2x better price-performance, and C4A metal, its first bare-metal Arm instance for specialized workloads. Together, Ironwood and Axion strengthen Google Cloud’s AI Hypercomputer ecosystem, combining hardware-software co-design, advanced networking, and liquid cooling to deliver unprecedented scalability, reliability, and cost efficiency for next-generation AI and general-purpose computing workloads.

Read More: Announcing Ironwood TPUs General Availability and new Axion VMs to power the age of inference