- Google has announced the development of its own Axion processor, based on Arm.
- The move gives Google an edge as it competes with Amazon and Microsoft in the AI cloud race.
- Google said Axion would offer better performance and power efficiency than previous chips.
Google has a new advantage over rivals like Amazon and Microsoft: It’s partnering with Arm to make more of its own chips.
Google announced its new processor, called Axion, on Tuesday. It follows Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure in creating custom Arm-based processors.
This decision constitutes a new step in the development of new computing resources by Google. Axion will be available for Cloud Services later this year. Google said Axion will improve the performance of “general purpose workloads”, such as open source databases, web and application servers, in-memory caches, data analysis engines, multimedia processing and AI training.
Google said the new Axion chips will deliver 30% better performance than the current fastest general-purpose Arm chips in the cloud. It will also improve performance by 50% and energy efficiency by 60%.
Processors – or central processing units – like Axion are essential to the AI arms race. Training complex AI models involves processing large data sets, which processors help run faster.
The computing power needed to train AI models is increasingly important. Big tech companies are in a race to develop AI, and Google is one of them. It has been developing AI for over a decade, integrating it into its search engine, advertising products and YouTube recommendations. But its AI chatbot Gemini lags behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Google’s move to make its own AI chips could create competition with partners like Nvidia and Intel, as Google moves away from relying on outside suppliers. This could, however, save Google money – purchasing AI chips is notoriously expensive. For example, Nvidia’s Blackwell chip is priced between $30,000 and $40,000.
The announcement “marks an important milestone in delivering custom silicon optimized for Google’s infrastructure,” said Arm CEO René Haas. in a report.
In addition to the Arm-based processor, Google also announced the general availability of the TPU v5p, which it says is its most powerful and scalable flexible AI accelerator.
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