AI breakthroughs aren’t just about creating smarter models anymore, they’re about making those models run faster, cheaper, and more responsively. I recently came across some exciting insights on how Google is powering this new age of AI, especially its shift from focusing solely on training to mastering inference at scale. The big news? Google’s announcement of its seventh-generation Ironwood TPUs and a fresh wave of Arm-based Axion VMs designed specifically for these demanding AI workloads.
Why the age of inference demands new kinds of compute
The current AI frontier, with giants like Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude, is all about enabling powerful, fast, and intuitive interactions with models – not just training them. I discovered that agentic workflows—those that combine multiple steps of logic, decision making, and orchestration are exploding in use. This means AI hardware and software need to be tightly integrated and vertically optimized to handle these complex, constantly evolving demands.
Enter Ironwood, Google’s latest TPU iteration, which boasts a 10x peak performance boost over TPU v5p and more than 4x better performance per chip versus its immediate predecessor, the TPU v6e. Ironwood is designed not just for training massive models or reinforcement learning but also for high-volume, low-latency AI inference. That dual focus on training and inference is critical to handle real-world AI workloads where users expect instant, reliable responses.
Alongside Ironwood, Google introduced new Arm-based Axion instances like the N4A VM and the upcoming C4A metal bare-metal instance. These promise up to 2x better price-performance than similar x86-based VMs. For AI systems, this means saving significant costs on the general-purpose compute side without sacrificing flexibility or power.
Inside Ironwood: unmatched scale, speed, and energy efficiency
Ironwood TPUs form the heart of Google’s AI Hypercomputer, a supercomputing platform integrating compute, networking, storage, and software. What really grabbed my attention was how Ironwood pods can scale to over 9,000 interconnected TPU chips, communicating at a staggering 9.6 Tb/s with 1.77 Petabytes of shared High Bandwidth Memory. This shatters previous bottlenecks and lays the foundation for training and serving the largest, most complex models ever.
What’s more, Google’s Optical Circuit Switching technology dynamically reroutes traffic to keep workloads running smoothly with minimal downtime – even at this huge scale. When you think about delivering AI-powered applications to millions, uninterrupted availability and ultra-low latency are absolute musts.
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The buzz is real. Anthropic plans to use up to 1 million Ironwood TPUs to scale their Claude AI model to millions of users. Companies like Lightricks and Essential AI report that Ironwood drastically cuts friction and cost while boosting precision and training efficiency for their generative models and frontier AI projects.
Axion VMs: redefining general-purpose compute for AI workflows
AI systems don’t run on accelerators alone. They also depend heavily on reliable, cost-effective CPUs to handle data prep, orchestration, web serving, and supporting AI applications. This is where Google’s Arm-based Axion family shines. The N4A instance, now in preview, is tailored for microservices, databases, batch processes, and AI data pipelines. It offers impressive flexibility and cost savings.
Meanwhile, the soon-to-be-released C4A metal bare-metal instance provides dedicated physical servers optimized for hypervisors, native Arm development, and specialized workloads like automotive systems or complex simulations.
Real-world users are already seeing benefits too. Vimeo’s video transcoding pipelines gained a 30% performance boost switching to N4A instances, while ZoomInfo achieved a 60% price-performance improvement running key data processing pipelines. Even in highly competitive ad tech, Rise reduced compute consumption by 20% and cut CPU usage by 15% with Axion VMs – translating into better margins and scalability.
Key takeaways for AI infrastructure enthusiasts
- Ironwood TPUs deliver unprecedented performance and energy efficiency for both training and inference workloads at massive scale.
- Arm-based Axion instances provide a cost-effective, flexible compute backbone that complements specialized AI accelerators and supports modern distributed AI systems.
- System-level co-design between hardware and software unlocks real efficiency gains, driving down costs and boosting reliability for the demanding AI workflows of today and tomorrow.
The big picture here is that the AI landscape is evolving quickly, and infrastructure needs to keep up, not just by adding raw compute power, but by rethinking how hardware and software fit together to deliver speed, scale, and savings. Google’s Ironwood TPUs and Arm-based Axion VMs illustrate what’s possible when innovation extends across silicon, system design, and software, supporting the next generation of AI applications.
If you’re excited by the potential of building or scaling AI-powered products, these offerings from Google could be game changers, combining the specialized horsepower for large-scale model training and inference with the versatile efficiency for everyday AI workloads.
It’s clear that the new frontier of AI won’t be defined just by smarter models but by smarter, more integrated infrastructure – ironwood and axion helping to forge that path.
