Google has announced its own line of custom Arm-based processors designed specifically for use in the data center.

Arm-based processors have become increasingly popular in data center and cloud operations as a result of their solid performance and superior energy efficiency. Google already has its own line of custom silicon, with its Tensor chip powering its Pixel line of smartphones and tablets.

The company has expanded its offerings, adding the Axion to its lineup.

Today, we are thrilled to announce the latest incarnation of this work: Google Axion Processors, our first custom Arm®-based CPUs designed for the data center. Axion delivers industry-leading performance and energy efficiency and will be available to Google Cloud customers later this year.

Google says Axion delivers significant performance improvements over general-purpose Arm-based chips that are commonly used in cloud applications.

Axion processors combine Google’s silicon expertise with Arm’s highest performing CPU cores to deliver instances with up to 30% better performance than the fastest general-purpose Arm-based instances available in the cloud today, up to 50% better performance and up to 60% better energy-efficiency than comparable current-generation x86-based instances1. That’s why we’ve already started deploying Google services like BigTable, Spanner, BigQuery, Blobstore, Pub/Sub, Google Earth Engine, and the YouTube Ads platform on current generation Arm-based servers and plan to deploy and scale these services and more on Axion soon.

“Google’s announcement of the new Axion CPU marks a significant milestone in delivering custom silicon that is optimized for Google’s infrastructure, and built on our high-performance Arm Neoverse V2 platform. Decades of ecosystem investment, combined with Google’s ongoing innovation and open-source software contributions ensure the best experience for the workloads that matter most to customers running on Arm everywhere.” – Rene Haas, CEO, Arm

Google says the Axiom is built on the standard Armv9 architecture, making it compatible with existing Arm-based workflows and software.

Customers will be able to use Axion in many Google Cloud services including Google Compute Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, Dataproc, Dataflow, Cloud Batch, and more. Arm-compatible software and solutions are now available on the Google Cloud Marketplace, and we’ve recently launched preview support for Arm-based instances migration in the Migrate to Virtual Machines service.