Hugging Face adds native TPU backend with TorchTPU
What happened
On 20 October 2026, the Hugging Face blog announced that Hugging Face has added support for TorchTPU, a native PyTorch backend. According to the report, Transformers, Diffusers and Kernels can now run directly on TPUs, and loading a model only requires passing device_map="tpu" or calling pipe.to("tpu"), with no need for torch_xla or Optimum TPU. This is the only report on the matter so far, with no follow-up or contradicting accounts.
Written by AI from the reports · updated 2 h ago
Timeline
Follow the reports to see the event from each side.
- Hugging Face BlogSelectedHugging Face ❤️ TorchTPU: TPUs, Natively
If you ever tried to run PyTorch on a TPU, you probably ported your code to torch_xla, or you ended up having to learn JAX. With TorchTPU, a native PyTorch backend, TPU is now just another device. It opens up native support of TPU in the Hugging Face ecosystem.
Heat of this event
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