Google pushing TPU roadmap
Briefing highlights Google’s continued TPU roadmap momentum as an alternative to commercial GPUs — a factor increasing cloud vs. on‑prem compute decision pressure for startups and enterprises. (dispatchesinternetpioneer.substack.com)
Google’s seventh‑generation TPU, codenamed Ironwood, is billed as delivering roughly 42.5 exaflops per pod and supports synchronous clusters of up to 9,216 chips per pod — figures Google and trade press say amount to “more than 10x” the prior generation’s peak. (datacentremagazine.com) Google’s product brief states Ironwood offers about a 10× peak performance jump over TPU v5p and roughly 4× better performance per chip versus TPU v6e, and the company pairs the new silicon with Arm‑based “Axion” VM instance types. (cloud.google.com) Anthropic announced on October 23, 2025 that it will expand use of Google Cloud TPUs — gaining access to up to one million TPUs and “well over a gigawatt” of capacity coming online in 2026 in a deal the companies described as worth tens of billions. (anthropic.com) Independent analysts and industry reports project Google’s TPU production and deployment to scale into the millions of units over 2026–2028, and note recent TPU generations are being fabbed on advanced nodes and co‑designed with partners such as Broadcom. (jonpeddie.com) Supply‑side scale is already creating new data‑center engineering demands: one analyst forecast estimated ~36,000 TPU v7 racks in 2026 and warned that supporting that fleet would require more than 10,000 optical circuit switches plus substantial power and cooling build‑out. (investing.com) Major AI labs’ shift to leased TPU capacity — exemplified by Anthropic’s commitment — is being framed by multiple outlets as a move away from buying on‑prem GPU farms toward consuming hyperscaler TPU capacity for better price‑performance on inference and large‑scale serving, even as Google continues to run some workloads on Nvidia GPUs. (tomshardware.com)
