Google Just Split Its TPU Into Two Chips. Here's What That Actually Signals About the Agentic Era.

Training and inference have always had different physics. Google just decided to stop pretending one chip could handle both. At Google Cloud Next '26 on April 22, Google announced the eighth generation of its Tensor Processing Units — but for the first time in TPU history, that generation isn't a single chip. It's two: the TPU 8t for training, and the TPU 8i for inference and agentic workloads. That architectural split is the most meaningful signal in this announcement, and most coverage has bur