During its Cloud Next conference this week, Google unveiled the latest generation of its TPU AI accelerator chip. The new chip, called Ironwood, is Google’s seventh-generation TPU and is the first optimized for inference — that is, running AI models. Scheduled to launch sometime later this year for Google Cloud customers, Ironwood will come in two configurations: a 256-chip cluster and a 9,216-chip cluster. “Ironwood is our most powerful, capable, and energy-efficient TPU yet,” Google Cloud VP A...