Google builds its own chips to turbo-power AIs

The tech giant decided not to source its chips from other providers, instead building its own customised processors, dubbed Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), for its machine learning software. "We've been running TPUs inside our data centers for more than a year, and have found them to deliver an order of magnitude better-optimized performance per watt for machine learning," Google said in a blog post. Since AI has only recently found commercial use cases, companies that process AI functions are still solely using graphics processing units (GPUs) to do the job. "TPU is tailored to machine learning applications, allowing the chip to be more tolerant of reduced computational precision, which means it requires fewer transistors per operation," Google said.