Google Launches Two New TPU Variants as External Customer Count Nears 100
Google introduced the TPU 8tx for confidential computing and the TPU 8i Max for memory-intensive workloads, announcing that it now serves nearly 100 external TPU customers.
On November 9, 2026, Google announced the addition of two new systems to its eighth-generation AI accelerator lineup: the TPU 8tx for confidential computing and the TPU 8i Max for memory-intensive workloads. This marks the first time Google has shipped four TPU systems within a single year, signaling a strategic shift from treating TPUs as an internal tool to marketing them as a competitive platform for external customers.
The TPU 8tx targets enterprises and government agencies working with confidential data. While data is typically encrypted during storage and transmission but decrypted in memory during processing, Google states that the TPU 8tx keeps data and model weights protected and isolated even during active use. The system uses the low-latency Boardfly network and delivers up to twice the latency reduction compared to the TPU 8t.
The TPU 8i Max addresses the memory bottleneck common in AI agent applications handling large codebases or video. By placing two TPU 8i chips on a single package, Google achieves double the compute power, double the memory, and double the memory bandwidth within the same rack format, significantly increasing performance per square meter of data center space.
Beyond hardware, Google released TorchTPU as open source to allow PyTorch code to run on TPUs with minimal changes, alongside support for inference frameworks like vLLM and SGLang. With nearly 100 external TPU customers, Google is increasingly positioning its in-house chips as an alternative to Nvidia GPUs, particularly for day-to-day model inference.