Google unveils Trillium chip, promising fivefold performance boost in AI data centers

Google, under its parent company Alphabet, has unveiled Trillium, the latest addition to its artificial intelligence data center chip family, promising nearly five times the performance of its predecessor.

During a briefing call with reporters, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai highlighted the significant increase in demand for machine learning computing, which has grown by a factor of 1 million in the last six years. Pichai emphasized Google's long-standing commitment to pioneering AI chips for over a decade, positioning the company to meet this growing demand.

Google's custom chips for artificial intelligence data centers provide a competitive alternative to Nvidia's dominant processors. Combined with Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), these chips have enabled Google to gain significant market share, currently holding the remaining 20% after Nvidia's 80% share.

The sixth-generation Trillium chip boasts 4.7 times better computing performance compared to the previous TPU v5e, a chip designed for large model text and media generation. Additionally, the Trillium processor is 67% more energy-efficient than its predecessor.

Google plans to make the new chip available to its cloud customers in late 2024.

The chips are designed to be deployed in pods of 256 chips that can be scaled to hundreds of pods, providing enormous computing power for AI tasks.