Superpod: Googles gigantic AI brain

Superpod: Google’s gigantic AI “brain”

This Google beast delivers around 4.8 exaFLOPS of performance. How insane is that number? If 8 billion people on Earth each performed one calculation per second, it would take all of humanity 19 years to finish the amount of work a Superpod does in one single second.

The entire training process of Google’s most powerful AI models takes place on these Superpods.

Each Superpod contains roughly 9,216 TPU (Tensor Processing Unit) chips. The history of the TPU is one of Google’s biggest and boldest technology bets — and one of its most successful — starting more than 12 years ago. The journey from the early, secretive days to today’s terrifyingly powerful Superpods has been filled with risk and massive investment.

Back in 2013, Google realized that if every user performed just 3 minutes of voice search per day, the company would have to double the number of its data centers. Something was clearly wrong with this new type of data. That realization gave birth to Google’s own “Manhattan Project”: building its own semiconductor chips.

A Superpod is not a single computer, but a tightly interconnected cluster of thousands of TPU chips. Reportedly, Google now has around one million of these chips. No NVIDIA purchases required.

This is what it means to build your own semiconductors.

Author

Ai Base Network (ABN), ABN ASIA was founded by people with deep roots in academia, with work experience in the US, Holland, Hungary, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, and Vietnam. ABN Asia is where academia and technology meet opportunity. With our cutting-edge solutions and competent software development services, we're helping businesses level up and take on the global scene. Our commitment: Faster. Better. More reliable. In most cases: Cheaper as well.

Feel free to reach out to us whenever you require IT services, digital consulting, off-the-shelf software solutions, or if you'd like to send us requests for proposals (RFPs). You can contact us at [email protected]. We're ready to assist you with all your technology needs.