Google has introduced its seventh-generation artificial intelligence (AI) chip, called Ironwood — a powerful new accelerator designed to boost AI performance significantly.
Ironwood is built specifically for inference, the process of handling data and generating responses when users interact with AI tools like ChatGPT. This chip allows faster calculations, helping chatbots and other AI systems deliver quicker and more efficient responses.
According to Google VP Amin Vahdat (via Reuters), Ironwood offers twice the performance per watt compared to last year’s Trillium chip. It’s engineered to handle complex computations and high-demand communication tasks used in advanced AI models, such as Large Language Models (LLMs), Mixture of Experts (MoEs), and reasoning-heavy operations — all of which require massive parallel processing and memory access.
To support this, Ironwood minimizes data movement and latency during large-scale tensor manipulations. As Google explained in a blog post, “We designed Ironwood TPUs with low latency and high-bandwidth ICI networking to enable coordinated, synchronized communication across large TPU pods.”
Ironwood will be available as part of the Google Cloud ecosystem and comes in two configurations tailored for different AI workloads: one with 256 chips, and another with a whopping 9,216 chips.
Thanks to Google’s advanced liquid cooling system and optimized chip design, Ironwood offers nearly twice the cooling efficiency of standard air-cooled systems — even under heavy, sustained workloads. In fact, it’s nearly 30 times more energy-efficient than the first-generation Cloud TPU introduced back in 2018.
While the chip’s TPU (Tensor Processing Unit) technology remains exclusive to Google engineers and internal teams, the goal is clear: to give Google’s AI a competitive edge.
With Ironwood, Google Cloud customers will be able to train and run AI workloads with ultra-low latency and top-tier performance. The chip is expected to roll out by the end of this year.
“We can’t wait to see what kind of AI breakthroughs our developers and Google Cloud customers will unlock with Ironwood,” the company added.
