Google plans a major expansion of its artificial intelligence infrastructure in 2026. This initiative centers on the mass deployment of its seventh-generation Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), codenamed Ironwood. The goal is to increase competition with GPU-based systems, which currently dominate the market.
The TPU v7 program shifts the design philosophy. It moves from individual servers to entire racks as the basic unit, tightly integrating hardware, networking, and software systemically. The new TPUs utilize a dual-chiplet design to improve cost efficiency and continue to use liquid cooling.
According to Fubon Research, the system’s architecture allows clusters of up to 9,216 TPUs to operate synchronously. Despite this scale, analysts remain cautious. They note the maturity of Nvidia’s CUDA ecosystem presents a significant hurdle for widespread adoption, as porting existing code at scale remains a difficult task for developers.