Google Introduces The Ironwood Chip To Accelerate AI Applications

Ironwood, Alphabet’s seventh-generation AI chip, was launched on Wednesday. According to the firm, it is intended to boost AI applications’ performance.

The Ironwood processor is designed to perform the kind of data processing required when users interact with programs like ChatGPT from OpenAI. The chips, which are referred to in the IT sector as “inference” computing, carry out quick computations to produce various kinds of responses or answers in chatbots.

One of the few feasible substitute chips for Nvidia’s (NVDA.O) potent AI processors is the search giant’s multibillion dollar, roughly ten-year endeavor.

Google’s internal AI project has an advantage over some competitors thanks to its tensor processing units (TPUs), which are only available to the company’s engineers or through its cloud service.

Google divided its TPU family of chips into a version optimized for creating massive AI models from scratch for at least one generation. In order to create a chip that lowers the cost of executing AI applications, its developers have created a second line of chips that eliminates some of the model-building characteristics.

According to Google vice president Amin Vahdat, the Ironwood chip is a model made for executing AI applications, or inference, and is intended to function in clusters of up to 9,216 chips.

Unveiled at a cloud conference, the new chip combines features from previous split designs and boosts memory capacity, making it more suitable for AI applications.

“It’s just that the relative importance of inference is going up significantly,” the research stated.

According to Vahdat, the Ironwood chips offer twice the performance for the energy required when compared to Google’s Trillium chip, which was unveiled last year. The business uses its own processors to develop and implement its Gemini AI models.

The manufacturer of the chips used to create the Google design was not disclosed by the corporation.

President Donald Trump’s abrupt tariff reversal caused Alphabet shares to soar during the regular session, closing up 9.7%.