Why Google's custom AI chips are shaking up the tech industry

Why Google's custom AI chips are shaking up the tech industry Ironwood is Google's latest tensor processing unit Nvidia's position as the dominant supplier of AI chips may be under threat from a specialised chip pioneered by Google, with reports suggesting companies like Meta and Anthropic are looking to spend billions on Google's tensor processing units. The success of the artificial intelligence industry has been in large part based on graphical processing units (GPUs), a kind of computer chip that can perform many parallel calculations at the same time, rather than one after the other like the computer processing units (CPUs) that power most computers. 'Flashes of brilliance and frustration': I let an AI agent run my day GPUs were originally developed to assist with computer graphics, as the name suggests, and gaming. "If I have a lot of pixels in a space and I need to do a rotation of this to calculate a new camera view, this is an operation that can be done in parallel, for many different pixels," says Francesco Conti at the University of Bologna in Italy. This ability to do calculations in parallel happened to be useful for training and running AI models, which often use calculations involving vast grids of numbers performed at the same time, called matrix multiplication.