By Stephen Nellis
(Reuters) – Google Cloud, a unit of Alphabet Inc, said on Wednesday that Spotify Technology and Paramount Global are using a new chip that it designed with technology from Arm Holdings to power their streaming services.
Google has made the new Axion chip, a central processing unit, or CPU, available to all customers on its cloud service. It is expected to compete for software developers’ budgets against traditional offerings from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices.
Google is the latest major cloud computing firm to offer a chip made with technology from Arm.
Amazon.com and Microsoft have also created their own Arm-based CPUs that they rent out to developers, and Ampere Computing, a startup founded by Intel veterans, is selling chips to Oracle’s cloud unit, among others.
The primary draw of the Arm-based chips is that they use far less electricity to get the same computing done than their Intel and AMD counterparts.
Google said its chip, which it sells via service called an “instance,” is about 60% more energy efficient than conventional CPUs, and every watt of power saved can be used for other tasks such as powering artificial intelligence, said Mark Lohmeyer, vice president and general manager of compute and artificial intelligence infrastructure at Google Cloud.
“This is not the first Arm instance that we’ve made available in the cloud, but I will say this is the first Google-designed Arm processor, and the first that we have fully brought into the overall Google infrastructure portfolio,” Lohmeyer told Reuters.
Google Cloud has already been using the chips internally to power some of its paid cloud services before the company on Wednesday made it available to all customers.
While Google Cloud also offers Arm-based chips from Ampere and will continue to support its past offerings, Lohmeyer said the company is turning its focus to its own Arm-based chips.
“We expect this to be the primary offering that our customers will use going forward.”
(Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco; Editing by Jacqueline Wong)
