Google says its AI supercomputer is faster, greener than Nvidia A100 chip

FILE PHOTO: The Google logo is pictured atop an office building in Irvine, California, U.S. August 7, 2017. REUTERS/Mike Blake

(Reuters) -Alphabet Inc's Google released on Tuesday new details about the supercomputers it uses to train its artificial intelligence models, saying the systems are both faster and more power-efficient than comparable systems from Nvidia Corp.

Google has designed its own custom chip called the Tensor Processing Unit, or TPU. It uses those chips for more than 90% of the company's work on artificial intelligence training, the process of feeding data through models to make them useful at tasks such as responding to queries with human-like text or generating images.