Research Note Google Debuts Ironwood TPU to Drive Inference-Focused AI Architecture at Scale
Futurum Group, Wednesday, April 23rd, 2025
Google launched Ironwood, its seventh-generation TPU, at Cloud Next '25. Designed specifically for inference, Ironwood scales to 9,216 chips delivering 42.5 exaflops of performance and introduces major improvements in efficiency, memory, and interconnect.
What is Covered in this Article:
- Google announced Ironwood, its seventh-generation TPU, at Cloud Next '25
- Ironwood is built specifically for inference, unlike prior TPUs, which support both training and inference
- At full scale (9,216 chips), Ironwood delivers 42.5 exaflops of compute
- Each chip includes 192 GB of HBM, 7.2 TBps memory bandwidth, and 4,614 TFLOPs
- Ironwood offers 2x the performance-per-watt of Trillium and is nearly 30x more efficient than TPU v2
The News: Google unveiled Ironwood, its seventh-generation Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), at the Cloud Next '25 conference. Ironwood is the first TPU designed specifically for inference workloads, marking a departure from prior designs that combined training and inference capabilities.