Google's cloud team is building A.I. chips for web-connected devices

Google is moving beyond developing artificial intelligence chips for its own data centers and is now designing them to work inside products made by other companies. After unveiling the Tensor Processing Unit two years ago, Google announced on Wednesday the Edge TPU, which will enable sensors and other gadgets to process data more quickly. The chips could be used in a wide variety of scenarios, but one initial use is in industrial manufacturing: Consumer electronics maker LG is testing them in a system that detects manufacturing defects in glass for displays. Google's jump into custom silicon is one way it's trying to expand its cloud market share against Amazon and Microsoft. Since 2015, Google has been using TPUs to accelerate certain workloads in its own data centers, rather than relying on commercially available hardware from vendors like Nvidia.