Axion, Arm’s first custom data centre CPU for Google, is now in use

Arm and Google Cloud are looking to redefine agentic AI infrastructure – a specialised, multi-layered technology stack designed to support autonomous, goal-driven AI agents – with the new Axion processor.

Google Axion processors are the first custom Arm-based CPUs designed for the rapidly developing data centre market.

Axion delivers industry-leading performance and energy efficiency and will be available to Google Cloud customers later this year.

Built using the Arm Neoverse V2 CPU, Axion processors deliver giant leaps in performance for general-purpose workloads like web and app servers, containerised microservices, open-source databases, in-memory caches, data analytics engines, media processing, CPU-based AI training and inferencing, and more.

C4A VMs, powered by Arm Neoverse V2 based Axion CPUs, are optimized to complement pure-play accelerators in handling these parallel, latency-sensitive workloads efficiently by enabling high-throughput AI inference on general-purpose compute.

These capabilities are already becoming evident in production environments. For example, the European online travel platform loveholidays runs large-scale embedding and inference workloads across petabytes of data, where accelerator-based approaches can be cost-prohibitive at scale.

“Running large-scale embedding and inference workloads on GPUs is cost-prohibitive at our data volumes, so maximizing CPU efficiency is critical,” said Dimitri Lerko, head of engineering, loveholidays. “Leveraging Axion family of C4A and N4A VMs gives us the price-performance headroom to build real-time AI decision-making pipelines with bespoke and open-source model inference using CPUs – something that simply wasn’t viable before.”

For organisations beginning their migration, Arm’s Cloud Migration Resource Hub provides 100-plus learning paths covering common workload patterns on Google Axion.

“Google’s announcement of the new Axion CPU marks a significant milestone in delivering custom silicon that is optimised for Google’s infrastructure, and built on our high-performance Arm Neoverse V2 platform,” said Rene Haas, CEO, Arm. “Decades of ecosystem investment, combined with Google’s ongoing innovation and open-source software contributions ensure the best experience for the workloads that matter most to customers running on Arm everywhere.”