Google Introduces New Cloud TPU VMs for Artificial Intelligence Workloads

Recently, Google announced new Cloud TPU Virtual Machines (VMs), which provide direct access to TPU host machines. With these VMs, the company offers a new and improved user experience to develop and deploy TensorFlow, PyTorch, and JAX on Cloud TPUs. Customers could already set up virtual instances in Google Cloud with the TPU chipsets. However, this presented some drawbacks as the instances did not run in the same server environment. The TPUs were connected to the chipsets remotely via a network connection, reducing the processing speed since applications had to send the data over the network to a TPU and then wait for the processed data to be sent back.