Google Makes Cloud TPU Accelerators Available to Public Beta Users

Google opens up its custom Tensor Processing Units on the Google Cloud Platform, allowing users to run machine learning workloads without specialized hardware expertise. The beta release provides access to powerful ASICs designed specifically to accelerate TensorFlow applications.

12 Feb 2018 • 1 min read

Google launches its custom Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) into public beta on the Google Cloud Platform, giving developers direct access to hardware built specifically for machine learning. These second-generation Cloud TPUs deliver up to 180 teraflops of floating point performance and include 64 GB of High Bandwidth Memory to handle demanding artificial intelligence tasks.

Users connect to these accelerators using high-level TensorFlow APIs, eliminating the need for the deep specialized expertise traditionally required to program custom ASICs. Google open-sources several reference models, such as ResNet-50 for image classification and Transformer for machine translation, to help developers start building and training their applications immediately.

The company designs these Cloud TPUs to handle massive consumer-facing workloads ranging from search and voice recognition to self-driving vehicle training. Multiple TPU boards link together via a dedicated high-speed network to form TPU pods, creating multi-petaflop supercomputers that offer an alternative to traditional CPUs and Nvidia GPUs in the cloud.

Qilin Ransomware Gang Exploits Critical Palo Alto VPN Flaw

The Qilin ransomware gang actively exploits a critical PAN-OS GlobalProtect authentication bypass vulnerability to breach corporate networks and deploy ransomware. The flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-0257, allows attackers to bypass security restrictions and establish unauthorized VPN connections on unpatched devices. Palo Alto Networks patched the vulnerability on May 13, but threat

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Deezer Reports AI-Generated Music Now Exceeds Half of All Daily Uploads

Music streaming service Deezer reports that AI-generated tracks now account for more than half of all daily uploads on its platform, reaching a peak monthly average of 90,000 tracks per day in June 2026. The figure represents a dramatic escalation from just 10% of daily uploads in January 2025,

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Data Centers on Track to Consume 20% of U.S. Electricity by 2035

Data centers in the United States are on pace to consume four times more electricity by 2035, accounting for roughly one-fifth of all power generated in the country, according to a new report from BloombergNEF. The surge is largely driven by explosive growth in artificial intelligence compute, with nearly half

21 Jul 2026 1 min read

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