TPU Training Day
Google I/O opens in front of thousands of people. This year it opened with a puppet.
TPUs are the chips Google builds for AI. They live in data centres, they do an enormous amount of the heavy lifting behind everything the company announces, and, visually speaking, they are a rectangle.
So for the film that opened I/O '26 we made Timmy: a TPU with a big day coming up, training for it like an athlete who has never once been outside.
Puppets x AI
It was made with Nexus, using real puppets and AI together, which sounds like something invented in a meeting to win a pitch. It wasn't. The puppets gave us a thing you could actually light and point a camera at. The AI did the parts a puppet can't.
Opening night
And here it is doing the job, in front of a room full of people who did not know they were about to be introduced to a chip with feelings.
