Inside Google’s multi-architecture revolution: Axion Arm joins x86 in production clusters

While x86 has been dominant for decades, a new migration project at Google represents a significant shift to more mixed architectures.

The tech giant has released the technical details of its ongoing transition to production clusters that can run both x86 and Axion Arm-based machines at the same time.

Flagship services including YouTube, Gmail, and BigQuery now run on both instruction set architectures (ISAs), and Google has migrated more than 30,000 applications, both enormous and tiny, to Arm — roughly one-third of its 100,000-plus applications.

This Google multi-architecture (“multiarch”) deployment not only signals a new era of hardware neutrality, but underscores Arm’s growing influence in hyperscale cloud environments.

“Google has created a dev pipeline to adopt multi-architecture as a guiding principle, and other cloud service providers (CSPs) are also moving in the same direction,” said Manish Jain, a principal research director at Info-Tech Research Group.

How Google migrated to Arm

During the migration from x86-only to Arm and x86, Google researchers ran production services on Axion