Google releases custom chips, competing with Microsoft and Intel

Google announces Axion, a custom ARM architecture-based CPU, to power AI operations in data centers.

Axion currently supports YouTube ads, Google Earth Engine, and other Google services. According to Thomas Kurian, Google's chief cloud officer, virtual servers containing Axion have 50% higher performance than equivalent virtual machines based on Intel's x86 model. Axion also delivers 30% more performance than the fastest general-purpose ARM virtual machines available today in the cloud.

Google's first datacenter Axion CPU based on ARM. Photo: Google Cloud

The new move shows that Google is trying to catch up with rivals such as Amazon and Microsoft, which have applied this strategy for many years. Technology companies with data centers are competing fiercely in the cloud infrastructure market, where organizations and businesses rent remote cloud services and pay according to usage.

Advertising still accounts for three-quarters of Alphabet, Google's parent company, but the cloud segment is also growing strongly at nearly 11%. However, according to estimates by analyst firm Gartner, Google will only hold 7.5% of the cloud service infrastructure market in 2022, while Amazon and Microsoft control 62%.

Amazon currently leads the market and introduced the Graviton ARM chip in 2018. Chirag Dekate, an analyst at Gartner, said the majority of Amazon's services have been optimized on the ARM ecosystem. According to him, the introduction of Axion will help Google complete the company's portfolio.

"Axion is built on an open platform, but customers can easily use it without needing to re- architect or rewrite their application".