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The computational bottleneck of topology optimization is the solution of a large number of linear systems arising in the finite element analysis. We propose fast iterative solvers for large three‐dimensional topology optimization problems to address this problem. Since the linear systems in the sequence of optimization steps change slowly from one step to the next, we can significantly reduce the number of iterations and the runtime of the linear solver by recycling selected search spaces from previous linear systems. In addition, we introduce a MINRES (minimum residual method) version with recycling (and a short‐term recurrence) to make recycling more efficient for symmetric problems. Furthermore, we discuss preconditioning to ensure fast convergence. We show that a proper rescaling of the linear systems reduces the huge condition numbers that typically occur in topology optimization to roughly those arising …