11 min read·
GPU clusters vs custom AI ASICs: energy efficiency, cost, and sustainability trade-offs
Custom AI ASICs like Google TPUs and AWS Trainium deliver 2–5× better performance per watt than general-purpose GPUs for inference workloads, but GPUs retain flexibility advantages for training. This guide compares total energy consumption, cooling requirements, and carbon footprint across leading chip architectures for sustainability-focused deployments.