Encrypting data at rest and in transit is routine. The hard part has been the moment a processor actually works on it, when the data normally has to be decrypted in memory. Google says its newest TPU system closes that gap for AI workloads, and it brought AMD along to do it.

In a blog post Monday morning, Amin Vahdat, Google’s SVP and chief technologist for AI and infrastructure, introduced TPU 8tx and TPU 8i Max, two additions to its eighth-generation family. With TPU 8t for training and TPU 8i for reasoning introduced at Cloud Next in April, that makes four TPU systems in one year, which Vahdat said is a first for Google. He also wrote that TPUs have grown into a business with nearly 100 customers, among them frontier labs, trading firms, retailers and universities.

Google calls these systems rather than new chips.…