Google unveils confidential TPU 8tx and high-memory TPU 8i Max with open-source TPU Sync

Google Cloud announced two eighth-generation Tensor Processing Unit systems on 9 November 2026, TPU 8tx and TPU 8i Max, bringing its eighth-generation accelerator lineup to four distinct configurations alongside TPU 8t and TPU 8i. TPU 8tx pairs TPU 8t silicon with fifth-generation AMD EPYC host processors over Google’s Boardfly optical interconnect to deliver hardware-encrypted confidential computing for regulated inference and mid-scale training. TPU 8i Max scales up the inference-focused 8i board with 2 times the compute, 2 times the on-chip SRAM and 2 times the HBM bandwidth to serve million-token context windows and dense mixture-of-experts workloads.

Agent Compute Engine and TPU Sync

Alongside the boards, Google introduced software layers aimed at stateful agentic traffic, where models pause while external code executes or tools return data. Agent Compute Engine suspends and resumes idle agent sessions across TPU pods, while open-source TPU Sync pools HBM, host DRAM, local storage and pod networking into one unified key-value (KV) cache tier. Google reports that TPU Sync cuts KV-cache transfer latency and time to first token by more than 90% on multi-turn agent workloads. Cloud Pathways and dynamic pod slicing also reached general availability on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), delivering up to 5 times faster cluster startup and 4.5 times faster fault recovery. Google did not publish hourly cloud instance rates in the announcement.