How Visko streams real-time world models on Google Cloud TPUs

Editor’s note: Generative AI startups are moving rapidly beyond static clip generation to build interactive, real-time worlds. In this technical deep dive, we explore how AI startup Visko collaborated with Google Cloud TPU engineers to deploy Orbis — its continuously streaming Live World Model—on Cloud TPUs, going from initial kickoff to production handover in just 30 days.

What makes a live video world model so challenging to serve in production? The bottleneck isn’t average throughput — it’s beating a relentless real-time clock. Unlike offline video generators where a user submits a prompt and waits in a queue, a live world model streams continuously. Every new chunk of video and synchronized audio must finish rendering before the viewer finishes watching the previous one, or the world freezes.

Today, we’re excited to share how Visko, an AI startup pioneering interactive world models, teamed up with Google Cloud to solve this exact challenge. Working side by side, Visko and Google Cloud engineers deployed Visko’s end-to-end live inference pipeline — combining video generation, super-resolution upscaling, and synchronized audio—onto a single Cloud TPU slice. Together, the teams brought end-to-end generation down, rendering at 1.07x playback speed.

Here is an inside look at how we engineered the pipeline to hit that milestone in a single month, the architectural optimizations that moved the needle, and practical lessons for other startups building ultra-low-latency generative AI on Google Cloud.

Redefining interactive media with Live World Models

While most generative video platforms focus on rendering fixed, pre-baked clips, Visko is building what it calls Live Models: video world models that generate continuously and respond on the fly.

Visko’s flagship model, Orbis, streams live video starting from a single text or image prompt. As the stream plays, viewers can enter new steering prompts in real time, dynamically evolving the scene without restarting or breaking continuity. For instance, in one test session, the livestream opens on a cat napping beside a crackling fireplace; when the viewer steers the scene to introduce a bowl of food, the bowl materializes seamlessly, and the cat stretches, stands up, and meows.

Since launching its public demo on September 1, 2026, Orbis has unlocked new possibilities across interactive entertainment, live commerce, AI companions, immersive education, and robotics simulation. To scale these interactive sessions reliably, Visko partnered with Google Cloud TPU engineers in August 2026 to port the Orbis live pipeline to Google’s Tensor Processing Unit (TPU). Within 30 days, the full multimodal pipeline was running in real time on TPUs.

Visko’s ambition is to power a new generation of interactive worlds that people can step into and shape in real time. Streaming continuous video and audio under a strict clock is a fundamentally different system challenge than offline clip generation. Working side by side with Google Cloud’s TPU engineers, we brought the full Orbis pipeline to TPUs in just 30 days — giving us the low-latency compute and memory bandwidth required to bring Live Models to creators and developers at scale.

“Visko is bringing an exciting new class of real-time, steerable workloads to the Cloud TPU ecosystem. By co-engineering their live multimodal pipeline on a singleTPU slice using JAX, torchax, and custom Pallas kernels, we proved how quickly a lean startup team can go from PyTorch prototype to render at 1.07x playback speed on Google Cloud’s AI Hypercomputer.”
– Dave Elliott, Head of Developer Advocacy for AI, Google Cloud 

Live video is a hard-deadline problem

When you serve an offline clip generator, latency is forgiving — the user waits once while the backend processes frames. A live world model has no waiting room.

Every single chunk must be denoised, decoded from latents, upscaled to 1664×936 (at 18 fps), and paired with generated audio faster than realtime playback speed, for as long as the session runs.

Two structural constraints make live world models far more demanding than standard batch inference:

• Batch size of one: Each live stream represents an individual viewer’s interactive session. You cannot mask latency by grouping dozens of concurrent requests into a massive batch — the standard playbook for keeping AI accelerators saturated.

• Strict sequential dependency: Every chunk depends directly on the one before it. Because the video model maintains a rolling memory of recent video latents so that chunk N+1 smoothly continues the action from chunk N, you cannot pre-render chunks out of order or parallelize across future timestamps.

For startup infrastructure engineers coming from LLM serving, it helps to think of live world modeling not as a tokens-per-second throughput benchmark, but as an unforgiving per-step latency SLO.

Architecting the multimodal pipeline on a single TPU slice

To keep infrastructure lean and cost-effective as Visko scales, the team designed the live pipeline to chain three distinct generative models on a single Cloud TPU slice running in BF16 precision.

When a viewer submits an initial prompt or a live steering update, all three generative models — the core video diffusion model, the super-resolution upscaler, and the audio generator — share the same chips, taking turns on the hardware for each chunk.