Google’s Cloud Tensor Processing Units are now available in public beta for anyone to try, providing customers of the tech titan’s cloud platform with specialized hardware that massively accelerates the training and execution of AI models.
The Cloud TPUs, which Google first announced last year, work by providing customers with specialized circuits solely for the purpose of accelerating AI computation. Google tested using 64 of them to train ResNet-50 (a neural network for identifying images that also serves as a benchmarking tool for AI training speed) in only 30 minutes.
