Google Cloud Annual Next Conference: TPU Chips Break the “Memory Wall”; OCS and Liquid Cooling Themes Unveiled as Expected

Glonghui, April 23｜On Wednesday local time, Google Cloud, the American cloud services giant, held the 2026 Next Conference and launched the "Agent-Based Enterprise" technology stack, aimed at driving enterprise workflows comprehensively towards intelligent agents. The stack covers a series of cutting-edge innovations, including the eighth-generation TPU and intelligent agent software platforms. At the start of the conference, Google CEO Sundar Pichai reiterated in a pre-recorded video the massive increase in capital expenditure, stating that the company would invest $175-185 billion this year, nearly six times the $31 billion spent in 2022.The most watched item by capital markets—the Tensor Processing Unit (TPU)—made its debut. Reportedly, Google's eighth-generation TPU has officially split into two different chips: the TPU 8t, designed for AI model training, and the TPU 8i, better suited for inference tasks. In addition to raw computing power, the TPU 8t boasts a comprehensive suite of Reliability, Availability, and Serviceability (RAS) features, including real-time telemetry monitoring across tens of thousands of chips, ICI interconnect links that can automatically detect and bypass faults without interrupting tasks, and Optical Circuit Switching (OCS) technology that enables automatic hardware topology reconfiguration around failures without manual intervention.The computing performance of the TPU 8t array is nearly three times higher than the previous generation Ironwood, with performance per watt increasing by up to two times. The TPU 8i is Google's solution to the "memory wall" bottleneck. To prevent processors from idling while waiting, the TPU 8i is equipped with 288GB high-bandwidth memory (HBM) and 384MB on-chip SRAM—the latter being three times that of the previous generation—allowing the model's active working set to remain entirely on-chip. Google Cloud also revealed that both the TPU 8t and TPU 8i run on the company's self-developed Axion ARM CPU platform, supported by its fourth-generation liquid cooling technology.