Data Management. Ayush Jain and Rajat Sen, Research Scientists, Google Research We introduce TimesFM-3, a state-of-the-art time series foundation model that enables highly accurate multivariate time series forecasting in a single forward pass, significantly outperforming other forecasting models across major benchmarks.

What happened

Ayush Jain and Rajat Sen, Research Scientists, Google Research We introduce TimesFM-3, a state-of-the-art time series foundation model that enables highly accurate multivariate time series forecasting in a single forward pass, significantly outperforming other forecasting models across major benchmarks. Since the debut of TimesFM in 2024, we’ve seen the adoption of time-series foundation models for real-world time-series forecasting tasks across multiple domains, such as retail, finance, observability, manufacturing, healthcare and natural sciences.

Up until TimesFM-2.5 (released in September 2025), our models were strictly limited to univariate forecasting: forecasting using only the history of a single time series. Yet, most real-world forecasting problems are inherently multivariate: where multiple time series and auxiliary external features jointly impact the future forecast of a time series.

Consider forecasting ice cream sales for a retail chain.

The important details

Past sales alone rarely tell the full story. A good forecast should also draw on sales of related products (e.g., ice cream cones, syrups), historical foot traffic, and known future events like weather forecasts, promotions, and holidays.

Today we introduce TimesFM-3, the next generation of our time-series foundation model that is natively pre-trained for multivariate forecasting. TimesFM-3 has 330 million parameters and is pre-trained on a real-world and synthetic time-series corpus comprising more than 1 trillion time points.

Building on the efficiency and zero-shot generalization of its predecessors, TimesFM-3 adds robust support for complex multivariate scenarios in a zero-shot manner.

Context and impact

It can jointly predict multiple coevolving time series, capturing dependencies that improve overall accuracy without requiring task-specific fine-tuning. The model natively supports: TimesFM-3 builds on the proven decoder-only transformer architecture of its predecessors.

As in previous versions, we process time series efficiently by grouping contiguous data points into patches of 32 time steps. We then apply normalization per time-series similar to that of TimesFM-2.5 in order to account for time series with vastly different scales.

For target and past-covariate series, a token is constructed directly from a single patch.

What comes next

However, for past-future covariates, TimesFM-3 employs a clever "lookahead" strategy: each token concatenates the current patch with future patches, allowing the model to peek at upcoming known signals. Once the patches are tokenized, they pass through an input residual block and enter the main transformer stack, which operates as a 2D grid: These two attention mechanisms alternate for several layers, seamlessly blending temporal patterns with cross-series relationships.

Previous versions of TimesFM generated forecasts one patch at a time, introducing latency, compounding error accumulation, and computational cost. TimesFM-3 uses the strategy of Contiguous Patch Masking to generate the entire forecasting horizon in a single forward pass.

The model appends masked placeholder tokens for the future horizon alongside the observed context.

Key signals

• Up until TimesFM-2.5 (released in September 2025), our models were strictly limited to univariate forecasting: forecasting using only the history of a single time series.
• As in previous versions, we process time series efficiently by grouping contiguous data points into patches of 32 time steps.
• Let’s revisit the ice cream sales example.

What to watch

Watch whether the capital produces faster shipping, deeper partnerships, or sharper competition in the category.