Google open-sources TorchTPU, a native PyTorch back end for TPUs
- Google open-sourced TorchTPU, a native PyTorch back end for TPUs, as the google-pytorch/torch_tpu repo on GitHub.
- The repo has 4,464 commits and 687 branches, and its latest commit, an optimization of spmd_util_collective_test, shows a failing CI status.
- Recent commits pin the OpenXLA revision to a 2026-10-20 commit and send single-chip Cloud TPU v5e tests to a self-hosted 8-chip runner pool when the RBE presubmit is unavailable.
- A clangd setup for C++ code navigation was added, and the authors skipped the Bazel compile commands extractor because its license does not fit Google OSS policy.
Hacker News opinions
Are there TPUs outside Google Cloud? Yes, the Google Coral USB and M.2 devices are TPUs, so the hardware is not limited to the cloud.
Google sells TPUs on prem to big customers like Anthropic, and Crux AI is a venture set up to do exactly that.
Maybe just marketing, but Pixel phones have NPUs that they also call TPUs.
Amazon is doing the same thing with AWS Trainium, there is a torch-neuronx repo for it. The PyTorch conference is today, so the timing is probably just that.
I don't think Google would rush a release because of a DeepSeek post. This sits on the training side while the inference engines sit on a different layer.
Hardware has always been the moat in AI. Products can be a moat too, but the chips are the hard part to copy.
I've been building an open source libtpu for Tenstorrent accelerators on the side, and it can already run most of torchtpu. The libtt repo at github.com/pcmoritz/libtt shows everything involved in lowering torch to tile based accelerators.
XLA is pretty good and might be a better compiler base than inductor, which could help performance on all hardware.
Since the hardware specifics live in the kernel layer like Pallas or CUDA, Jax vs PyTorch is mostly a style choice now.
Is the Linux driver available?
They sell IoT grade TPUs, and you can rent them on cloud. Anthropic is a heavy TPU user along with Trainium and GPUs.