Google unveils new AI chip variants as cloud demand surges

Google has expanded voluntary exit offers to employees in five countries as it looks to manage costs and shift resources towards AI and cloud computing. (Express Image/Reuters)

Alphabet’s Google introduced two new variations of its in-house tensor processing units on Monday, stepping up its challenge to Nvidia’s dominance in the booming market for artificial intelligence chips.

Alphabet shares were up more than 3% in early trading.

Google’s TPUs have primarily ⁠been ​used internally for products such as Search, YouTube and Gemini, but the company has been making the chips available through its cloud business to attract ​enterprise AI ​customers.

TPU sales made a ⁠meaningful contribution to results in the September quarter, according to Alphabet, with Google Cloud revenue ‌more than doubling to $30.71 billion.

The new chips, 8tx and 8i Max, are redesigned versions of existing processors tailored for specific customer needs, according to the company. Bloomberg News first reported the development earlier in the day.

The 8tx ⁠is aimed ⁠at government agencies and companies in regulated industries that need to keep sensitive ⁠data ‌protected while it is being processed.

It pairs ​Google’s chip technology with AMD’s processors ‌and encrypts data at the hardware level, delivering up to twice the speed of ‌the previous ​version with ​virtually ​no trade-off in performance, the company said.

The 8i Max, meanwhile, is designed ​for AI applications that need to process ⁠very large amounts of information at once.

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It combines two chips into a single package to ‌provide additional memory ⁠and computing power, the company said, making it well suited for coding ​assistants, mathematical reasoning and drug-discovery tasks.