May 14 (Reuters) - Google parent Alphabet on

Tuesday unveiled a product called Trillium in its artificial

intelligence data center chip family that it says is nearly five

times as fast as its prior version.

"Industry demand for (machine learning) computer has grown

by a factor of 1 million in the last six years, roughly

increasing 10-fold every year," Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said

in a briefing call with reporters. "I think Google was built for

this moment, we've been pioneering (AI chips) for more than a

decade."

Alphabet's effort to build custom chips for AI data centers

represents one of the few viable alternatives to Nvidia's ( NVDA )

top-of-the-line processors that dominate the market.

Together with the software that is closely tied to Google's

tensor processing units (TPUs), the chips have allowed the

company to take a significant share of the market.

Nvidia ( NVDA ) commands roughly 80% of the AI data center chip

market, and the vast majority of the remaining 20% is various

versions of Google's TPUs. The company doesn't sell the chip

itself, but rents access through its cloud computing platform.

The sixth-generation Trillium chip will achieve 4.7 times

better computing performance compared with the TPU v5e,

according to Google, a chip designed to power the tech that

generates text and other media from large models. The Trillium

processor is 67% more energy efficient than the v5e.

The new chip will be available to its cloud customers in

"late 2024," the company said.

Google's engineers achieved additional performance gains by

increasing the amount of high-bandwidth memory capacity and

overall bandwidth. AI models require enormous amounts of

advanced memory, which has been a bottleneck to further boosting

performance.

The company designed the chips to be deployed in pods of 256

chips that can be scaled to hundreds of pods.