Google Takes Aim at Nvidia With New AI Chips Built for Privacy and Massive Memory

In brief

• Google announced two specialized systems to its eighth-generation TPU lineup.
• TPU 8tx aims to protect sensitive data during AI processing.
• Dual-chip TPU 8i Max doubles memory bandwidth for demanding AI agents.

Google unveiled two artificial intelligence computing systems Monday, challenging Nvidia with chips built for privacy and memory-intensive AI.

The TPU 8tx and TPU 8i Max join Google’s eighth-generation Tensor Processing Unit lineup, giving businesses four configurations for training and running AI models. Google says it serves nearly 100 TPU customers, from AI labs to universities.

Unlike Nvidia’s widely used graphics processing units, TPUs are purpose-built AI accelerators. Google developed them for its own services but increasingly sells access to outside companies, including on-premises customers.

“With computing moving from human to agent scale, businesses are asking for accelerators that can reason across AI models’ massive context windows,” wrote Amin Vahdat, Google’s chief technologist and senior vice president of AI and infrastructure, in Google's announcement.

Keeping sensitive information private

TPU 8tx targets a problem that many serious businesses have when it comes to adopting AI: protecting sensitive information while a model is using it.