Google has joined Amazon and Microsoft in developing a homegrown Arm-based data-center processor. The new Axion processor will be available to Google Cloud customers later this year. The company has been developing Arm software and is already running services on compatible processors, likely from Ampere. Based on Arm Neoverse V2 CPUs and integrating Google Titanium controllers (cf AWS Nitro System), Axion promises greater performance and efficiency than x86 processors. Google, however, has provided too few details to put its claims in context.
Further evidence of Arm’s growing server-processor share, Axion liberates Google from AMD and Intel. It should cost less than Epyc or Xeon, helping Google to shift its capex budget elsewhere. More importantly, its promised energy efficiency should help the company reduce opex and simplify data-center design and management—or shift power budget elsewhere (e.g., to AI chips). We foresee an Axion variation with added I/O throughput complementing Google’s TPU AI accelerator much like Nvidia Grace complements Hopper and Blackwell and be further differentiated from standard server processors. As the Arm software ecosystem matures and Azure and Google join AWS in offering Arm instances, cloud customers will also gain independence from x86.