There are not many woods harder than Ipe nor more resistant to fire, but those are not necessarily the most ideal traits for a cutting board as the silica content that gives them a good portion of that hardness and resistance is also hard on tooling edges — however, for the quantity of board feet in a cutting board it is the wear on your knife set that might be the greater long term concern as it will be roughly equivalent to using a very fine grit sandpaper for a cutting board. Knives would not be expected to cut as deeply into Ipe over time versus a softer wood, but that, again, comes at the expense of increased wear on knife edges which will mean more regular sharpening (how much added sharpening is hard to quantify as that depends in part upon how much pressure is applied to the knife). I’m not a chef nor an expert on knives by far, but my understanding is that an end grain style cutting board made from a softer wood with much lower silica content (less abrasive) is much easier on the knives over the long haul.
Ipe, again due to the silica content, is hard on machining tool edges and carbide knifes and blades will hold up best, but in limited quantity it is not a major tooling concern unless you will be processing a lot of Ipe or if your tooling edges are already dull (in which case you will want to have your tooling sharpened first). You will want to be gentle and take lighter than normal passes during jointing and planing operations and very, very, light passes when routing the wood.
I’ve not had a chance to work with Ipe myself, but if it works anything like Purpleheart (at half the Janka Hardness, around 1800) then that means very light passes with sharp bits or the wood is prone to kickbacks if the bit takes too large a bite and ends up cleaving the wood in two as working Purpleheart with a router was like trying to route a piece of glass and I had to limit passes to no more than 1/32” per pass (yes, 32 passes to penetrate 1-inch!). I had much more issues with trapped operations on the router or when cutting across the grain as opposed to jointing or planing operations where things went quite smoothly save for taking cuts at about half my usual depth — but, again, this is based upon my experience with Purpleheart at half the hardness of Ipe and not Ipe itself.
