On Wednesday, Alphabet unveiled its seventh-generation artificial intelligence (AI) chip named Ironwood, which the company stated is engineered to accelerate the performance of AI applications.
The Ironwood processor is tailored for the type of data processing required when users pose queries to software such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Known within the tech industry as “inference” computing, these chips perform rapid calculations to generate answers in a chatbot or produce other forms of responses.
The search giant’s multi-billion dollar, approximately decade-long endeavor represents one of the few viable alternative chips to Nvidia’s powerful AI processors.
Google’s tensor processing units (TPUs) are exclusively accessible to the company’s own engineers or through its cloud service and have provided its internal AI efforts with an advantage over some competitors.
For at least one generation, Google divided its TPU family of chips into a version optimized for building large AI models from the ground up. Its engineers have developed a second line of chips that omits some of the model building features in favor of a chip that reduces the costs associated with running AI applications.
The Ironwood chip is a model designed for executing AI applications, or inference, and is engineered to operate in clusters of up to 9,216 chips, according to Amin Vahdat, a Google vice president.
The new chip, launched at a cloud conference, integrates functionalities from earlier split designs and increases the available memory, making it better suited for serving AI applications.
“It’s just that the relative importance of inference is going up significantly,” Vahdat explained.
The Ironwood chips deliver double the performance for the same amount of energy compared to Google’s Trillium chip announced the previous year, Vahdat noted. The company builds and deploys its Gemini AI models using its own chips.
The company did not disclose the specific chip manufacturer responsible for producing the Google design.
Alphabet shares experienced a surge during the regular trading session, closing up by 9.7% following President Donald Trump’s announcement of a sudden reversal on tariffs.
