Alphabet Inc., the parent company of Google, on Wednesday introduced its newest artificial intelligence chip—Ironwood—a seventh-generation processor designed to boost the performance of AI applications like chatbots and generative tools. The announcement was made during Google’s Cloud Next conference, highlighting the company’s continued investment in proprietary chip technology.
Built for Inference and High-Performance AI Workloads
The Ironwood chip is specifically engineered for “inference” computing—handling the real-time data processing and calculations needed when users interact with AI tools such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini. Unlike chips used for training AI models, inference chips are optimized for delivering fast, efficient results when a model is already trained and deployed.
Amin Vahdat, Vice President at Google, explained that Ironwood integrates features from prior TPU (Tensor Processing Unit) generations and is tailored for running AI applications at scale. “The relative importance of inference is going up significantly,” Vahdat said, noting that Ironwood is designed to function in large groups of up to 9,216 interconnected chips, enhancing its scalability for enterprise use.
Energy Efficiency and Unified Design
The Ironwood chip boasts a 2x performance improvement in energy efficiency compared to Google’s previous Trillium chip, unveiled last year. By combining model-serving capabilities with increased memory capacity, Ironwood delivers a unified solution for inference tasks without requiring separate chip families for training and deployment.
While Google’s TPUs are only available to internal teams and cloud customers, they represent one of the few alternative architectures challenging Nvidia’s dominance in the AI chip market. Google did not reveal the chip’s manufacturing partner but reiterated that the Gemini AI models are trained and deployed using its own TPU infrastructure.
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Market Context: Tariff Relief Lifts Tech Stocks
Alphabet shares surged nearly 10% following a surprise announcement by President Donald Trump reversing certain tariff policies—a move that lifted overall market sentiment and gave additional momentum to the tech sector.
With Ironwood, Google continues to refine its AI infrastructure and assert its leadership in custom silicon, offering cloud customers enhanced capabilities for running next-generation applications.
