SAN FRANCISCO, April 9 (Reuters) - Google on

Tuesday revealed the details of a new version of its data center

artificial intelligence chips and announced an Arm-based

based central processor.

WHY IT'S IMPORTANT

Google's tensor processing units (TPUs) are one of the few

viable alternatives to the advanced AI chips made by Nvidia ( NVDA )

, though developers can only access them through

Google's Cloud Platform and not buy them directly.

Google plans to offer the Arm-based central processing unit

(CPU) called Axion via Google Cloud. The company said it has

superior performance to x86 chips, and general-purpose Arm chips

in the cloud.

KEY QUOTE(S)

"We're making it easy for customers to bring their existing

workloads to Arm," said Mark Lohmeyer, Google Cloud's vice

president and general manager of compute and machine learning

infrastructure. "Axion is built on open foundations but

customers using Arm anywhere can easily adopt Axion without

re-architecting or re-writing their apps."

CONTEXT

Rival cloud operators such as Amazon.com ( AMZN ) and

Microsoft ( MSFT ) have built Arm CPUs as a way of

differentiating the computing services they offer. Google has

built other custom chips for YouTube, AI and its smartphones but

had not built a CPU.

Broadcom ( AVGO ) has partnered with Google on prior

generations of the TPU chips. Google declined to comment on

whether it used a design partner for Axion and Broadcom's ( AVGO )

involvement with the TPU v5p.

BY THE NUMBERS

The Alphabet subsidiary said the new TPU v5p chip is built

to run in pods of 8,960 chips, and can achieve twice the raw

performance as the prior generation of TPUs. To help ensure the

pod runs at optimal performance, Google uses liquid cooling.

The Axion chip offers 30% better performance than

"general-purpose Arm chips, and 50% better performance than

current generation x86 chips produced by Intel ( INTC ) and

Advanced Micro Devices ( AMD ).

WHAT'S NEXT

Axion is in use in several Google services such as its

YouTube Ads in Google Cloud. The company plans to expand such

uses and make them available to the public "later this year."

The TPU v5p is generally available via Google's cloud on

Tuesday.