Fine-Tuning and Serving Gemma 4 31B on Google Cloud TPU: A Technical Comparison with GPU Baselines

Abstract:We present the first end-to-end demonstration of fine-tuning and serving Google's Gemma 4 31B model on TPU hardware, providing an empirical comparison of TPU and GPU platforms for large language model adaptation. Using LoRA on a Google TPU v5p-8 for training and TPU v6e-8 (Trillium) for inference, we document the full set of code-level adaptations required to port a GPU-native training recipe, built on PyTorch, HuggingFace TRL, and FSDP, to the JAX + Tunix/Qwix stack. These adaptations span mesh configuration, LoRA module naming conventions, sharding annotation corrections, gradient checkpointing, data pipeline restructuring, and a custom Orbax-to-safetensors checkpoint merging procedure. For inference, we detail the vLLM-TPU Docker setup necessary to serve Gemma 4 on v6e-8 and characterize the resulting latency and throughput profile. Compared with a 2xH100 GPU baseline under identical hyperparameters, TPU training completes 1.61x faster at 2.12x lower cost. Inference throughput is within 3% across platforms, while TPU achieves 2x lower time-to-first-token (235 ms vs. 475 ms). Together, the TPU configuration is 1.82x cheaper for a representative train-plus-service workload. Our work removes a critical gap in the open tooling ecosystem and provides practitioners with a reproducible, production-ready recipe for Gemma 4 deployment on TPU infrastructure.

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing (cs.DC); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2605.25645 [cs.DC]

(or arXiv:2605.25645v2 [cs.DC] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.25645 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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