Google reveals its custom AI chip, the TPU

At its annual Google I/O developer conference, Google revealed the Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), a chip it had designed in-house specifically for machine learning. In his keynote, CEO Sundar Pichai said the company had "been running TPUs inside our data centers for more than a year, and have found them to deliver an order of magnitude better performance per watt for machine learning." They were already behind RankBrain, used to improve search relevance, and Street View processing, and had been used in the AlphaGo match against Lee Sedol weeks earlier. Choosing to build purpose-made silicon rather than buy general-purpose GPUs laid the foundation for Google's compute business — the same TPUs that Anthropic would later contract for by the million.