Google Cloud Makes Canonical-Certified Ubuntu Default for TPU VMs

Google Cloud’s Tensor Processing Units are purpose-built accelerators for training and serving artificial intelligence models, while TPU VMs give customers direct access to that computing capacity through a virtual-machine environment. Making Canonical-certified Ubuntu the standard software foundation is significant because it reduces the work required to configure drivers, runtimes and support processes, helping enterprises move workloads built with JAX, PyTorch and TensorFlow from experimentation into production more consistently.

Canonical and Google Cloud said on May 28, 2026, that certified Ubuntu images would be provisioned by default when customers create Cloud TPU VMs through Compute Engine. Google’s current documentation pairs the seventh-generation TPU 7x, known as Ironwood, with Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, while v6e, or Trillium, v5p and v5e use Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. The images include required TPU runtimes, drivers and agents, with optimization extending to Ray for distributed workloads. No financial terms were disclosed.