Our eighth generation TPUs: two chips for the agentic era

· ai hardware · Source ↗

Article

TL;DR: Google splits TPU 8 into dedicated inference (8i) and training (8t) chips, delivering 2x perf/watt over gen 7.

Key Takeaways

  • TPU 8t superpod: 9,600 chips, 2PB shared HBM, 121 ExaFlops of compute
  • Vertical integration lets Google optimize cost at datacenter scale — Nvidia can’t match that
  • At $15/GB for HBM4, the 331TB per pod is ~$5M in memory alone

Discussion

Top comments:

  • [pmb]: Google’s whole-datacenter context makes it structurally more cost-efficient than chip vendors
  • [TheMrZZ]: 9,600 chips and 2PB shared HBM sounds like a real competitive advantage
  • [Keyframe]: Google’s been growing quietly while competitors dominated the news cycle
  • [paulmist]: At $15/GB HBM4, the 331TB per pod is $5M in memory alone

Discuss on HN