How Artificial Intelligence Can Boost Google's Cloud Revenue

Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL) CEO Sundar Pichai said at the Google I/O conference that the company has built a Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) as part of its AI (artificial intelligence) initiative. Google built an AI computer system for Chinese board game Go which beat a human player. The AI system, called AlphaGo, was powered by the TPU. Although AlphaGo's win is somewhat like IBM (NYSE:IBM) Watson's Jeopardy win in 2011, building a TPU could have deeper implications for developing tomorrow's AI systems. Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) is a custom ASIC for machine learning that fits in the same footprint of a hard drive, and was the secret sauce for AlphaGo in Korea.