Google Has Built Its Own Custom Chip for AI Servers Data Center Knowledge

Last October, a computer system beat a professional human player at the ancient Chinese board game Go. The AI system, AlphaGo, was built by Google and trained using machine learning techniques. Google built the hardware that powered AlphaGo in-house, as it does with most of its infrastructure components. At the core of that hardware is the Tensor Processing Unit, or TPU, a chip Google designed specifically for its AI hardware, the company's CEO, Sundar Pichai, said from stage this morning during the opening Google I/O conference keynote next to Google headquarters in Mountain View, California. This is the first time Google has shared any information about the hardware backend that powers its AI, which will play a central role in the company's revamped cloud services strategy, announced earlier this year.