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Publication Date: 2025-11-28 16:00:00
Ironwood is Google’s latest tensor processing unit
Nvidia’s position as the dominant supplier of AI chips may be under threat from a specialised chip pioneered by Google, with reports suggesting companies like Meta and Anthropic are looking to spend billions on Google’s tensor processing units.
What is a TPU?
The success of the artificial intelligence industry has been in large part based on graphical processing units (GPUs), a kind of computer chip that can perform many parallel calculations at the same time, rather than one after the other like the computer processing units (CPUs) that power most computers.
GPUs were originally developed to assist with computer graphics, as the name suggests, and gaming. “If I have a lot of pixels in a space and I need to do a rotation of this to calculate a new camera view, this is an operation that can be done in parallel, for many different pixels,” says Francesco Conti at the University of Bologna in…