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Google’s Ironwood TPU in the Age of Thinking Models and Proactive AI

  • Writer: learnwith ai
    learnwith ai
  • 6 days ago
  • 2 min read

Pixel art of a server against a starry night sky with a crescent moon. An orange bar graph rises beside it, adding a digital vibe.
Pixel art of a server against a starry night sky with a crescent moon. An orange bar graph rises beside it, adding a digital vibe.

At Google Cloud Next '25, Google unveiled a monumental advancement in AI hardware:

Ironwood, the seventh-generation Tensor Processing Unit. Unlike its predecessors, Ironwood is the first TPU engineered specifically for inference. It marks a shift from reactive data interpretation to proactive insight generation, powering what Google calls the age of inference.


With up to 42.5 exaflops in a single 9,216-chip configuration, Ironwood outperforms even the world’s largest supercomputer—El Capitan—by over 24x. Each chip delivers a staggering 4,614 teraflops, and thanks to a liquid-cooled design, Ironwood handles these workloads with remarkable thermal and power efficiency.


Purpose-Built for a New Kind of AI


Ironwood isn’t just a chip. It’s an ecosystem tailored for "thinking models" like large language models (LLMs), Mixture of Experts (MoEs), and advanced AI agents that go beyond processing they interpret, decide, and act.


Its high-bandwidth memory (HBM) has been supercharged to 192 GB per chip, six times more than the previous generation, while HBM bandwidth reaches 7.2 Tbps, fueling larger datasets and faster access. Add in the 1.2 Tbps bidirectional Inter-Chip Interconnect, and Ironwood becomes a dream machine for scalable distributed computing.


The Engine Behind the Smartest AI


Ironwood is tightly integrated with Google’s Pathways software stack, the same runtime that powers AI breakthroughs from DeepMind. With Pathways, developers can compose hundreds of thousands of Ironwood TPUs to support everything from foundation models like Gemini 2.5 to transformative research projects like AlphaFold.


Google's AI Hypercomputer architecture ensures that Ironwood doesn’t just perform—it scales gracefully, with breakthrough performance-per-watt. In fact, it's nearly 30 times more power efficient than the first generation Cloud TPU.


Designed for the Future of AI


Key highlights include:


  • Up to 42.5 exaflops per pod, a massive leap in AI compute power.

  • 2x perf/watt vs. Trillium, Google's 6th-gen TPU.

  • Enhanced SparseCore for ultra-large embeddings in recommendation engines and scientific workloads.

  • Optimized for training and inference, especially for reasoning-based AI tasks.


As power constraints tighten and model complexity skyrockets, Ironwood is set to become the backbone for high-performance, cost-efficient AI workloads across industries.


Conclusion


Ironwood isn’t just another TPU. It’s the hardware foundation for AI agents that think, interpret, and act independently.


As the world shifts from data processing to insight generation, Ironwood positions Google Cloud at the heart of that transformation. With unmatched scalability, energy efficiency, and computational muscle, Ironwood is ready to redefine what’s possible in artificial intelligence.


—The LearnWithAI.com Team


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