Google Cloud unveils eighth-generation TPUs built to support an agentic era

Next-gen TPUs promise huge performance boosts

by · TechRadar

News By Craig Hale published 27 April 2026

(Image credit: Google)

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  • Google unveils next-generation TPUs – splits off into two series, 8t and 8i
  • 8t superpods can deliver 121 ExaFlops, up from 42.5 last year
  • 8i delivers 3x more SRAM and increased HBM

Google Cloud has announced its eighth-generation Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) designed specifically for the agentic shift we're seeing within AI at the moment.

Revealed at Google Cloud Next 2026, the upgrades focus on longer context windows, multi-step reasoning and responsiveness at scale, thus its cloud infrastructure is being rebuilt to support persistent memory, continuous inference and multi-model workloads.

This year, we're seeing two distinct TPUs designed to support massive HBM scaling, with Google Cloud placing an emphasis on memory bandwidth as much as compute.

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TPU 8t and 8i target trillion-parameter training in million-chip clusters

The first of two TPUs, 8t, has been optimized to be distributed across huge clusters for training foundation models. With around an 80% year-over-year improvement in performance per dollar, the company says it will train trillion-parameter models more efficiently.

Google Cloud explained that a single TPU 8t superpod can scale up to 9,600 chips, delivering 2PB of shared HBM and 121 ExaFlops of compute. For comparison, last year Ironwood was rated at up to 9,216 chips in a superpod and 42.5 ExaFlops.

Google Cloud also warned of "the latency wall" we face in an always-on agentic era, hence the launch of 8i, a second chip which serves as a post-training and inference engine.

TPU 8i sees around a 3x increase in on-chip SRAM to 384MB as well as 288GB of HBM, with pod size now up to 1,152 chips from 256, delivering 11.6 ExaFlops of performance (up from 1.2 ExaFlops).

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