260 things we announced at Google Cloud Next '26 – a recap

Google Cloud Next ‘26 took place this week in Las Vegas, and the energy was incredible as we welcomed over 32,000 leaders, developers, and partners to explore the Agentic Era with us.

Across three keynotes, 25 spotlights, 700+ breakout sessions, 490+ sponsorships, our Showcase & Expo tech playground, and innumerable impromptu networking and collaboration moments, you could really feel the excitement as organizations move from pilot to production at a scale the world has never seen.

During our opening keynote and throughout the week, we shared our blueprint for the agentic enterprise and all the latest innovations for businesses to meet this moment. To name just a few:

• * **Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform**, our new, comprehensive platform to build, scale, govern, and optimize agents

• **Gemini Enterprise app** brings the best of Google AI to every employee, for every workflow and includes new features that let every employee build with AI

• **Google Cloud’s AI Infrastructure** offers the industry’s widest variety of compute options and new innovations at every layer of the AI Hypercomputer, including our new 8th generation TPUs

• **Agentic Defense** is delivered via a cybersecurity platform that combines Google’s Threat Intelligence and Security Operations with Wiz’s Cloud and AI Security Platform to detect, prevent, and respond to threats

• **Agentic Data Cloud** introduces a new, AI-native architecture that allows your data to be utilized at the speed and scale required by agentic AI

• **Agentic Taskforce** redefines engagement and productivity with new innovations across our Gemini Enterprise for Customer Experience and Workspace products

• And so much more

That was just the tip of the iceberg from a jam-packed week of programming. So, we’ve pulled together a comprehensive summary of all 260 announcements we made across our products, partners, and customers at Next ‘26 below.

Product news

AI models, platforms and agents

As you move toward an autonomous enterprise, where agents act with the same independence and reliability as members of your team, you need a new agentic foundation that can sustain your trust. Here’s how we do it:

**1.****Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform:**Build, scale, govern, and optimize agents. As the evolution of Vertex AI, it offers the model selection, model building, and agent building capabilities that customers love, plus new features for agent integration, DevOps, orchestration, and security.

Within Agent Platform, we announced many new features that help you move from managing individual AI tasks to delegating business outcomes with total confidence:

**2.****Agent Development Kit (ADK):** Unlocks more powerful reasoning by organizing agents into a network of sub-agents. This new, graph-based framework allows you to define clear, reliable logic for how agents work together to solve complex problems.

**3.****Agent Studio:** Go from building simple prompts to deploying complex agents in Agent Studio. Once you're ready for deep customization, export your logic directly into ADK to continue development in a full-code environment.

**4.****Agent Runtime:**Delivers sub-second cold starts and allows you to provision new agents in seconds.

**5.****Agent Sandbox:**Now available for everyone, provides a hardened environment to safely execute model-generated code and perform computer-use tasks like browser-based automation without risk to your host systems. Read more here.

**6.****Agent Memory Bank**: Personalizes interactions by dynamically generating and curating long-term memories from conversations. Using new Memory Profiles, agents can recall high-accuracy details with low latency, so as not to lose context. Read more here.

**7.****Agent Sessions:**Stores and manages history. With Custom Session IDs, you can use your own unique identifiers to track sessions and map them directly to your internal database and CRM records. Read more here.

**8.****Agent Identity:**Assigns every agent a verifiable identity in the form of a unique cryptographic ID. This creates a clear, auditable trail for every action an agent takes, mapped back to defined authorization policies. Read more here.

**9.****Agent Registry:**Maintains a central library of approved tools. It indexes every internal agent, tool, and skill, simplifying discovery and ensuring only governed, approved assets are available to your users. Read more here.

**10.****Agent Gateway:**Manages your agent fleet from one control point, providing secure, unified connectivity between agents and tools across any environment, while enforcing consistent security policies and Model Armor protections to safeguard against prompt injection and data leakage. Read more here.

**11.****Agent Anomaly Detection:** Detects suspicious behavior in real time and uses statistical models and an LLM-as-a-judge framework to flag unusual reasoning. It works alongside Agent Threat Detectionto provide visibility into malicious activity, such as reverse shells or connections to known bad IP addresses.

**12.****Agent Security dashboard:** Uncovers vulnerabilities automatically. Powered by , it unifies threat detection and risk analysis, allowing teams to map relationships between agents and models, automate asset discovery, and scan for vulnerabilities in the underlying operating system and language packages. Read more here.

**13.****Agent Simulation:** Simulates realistic conversations and tests agents against human-like synthetic user interactions and virtualized tools in a controlled environment. Agents are automatically scored based on task success and safety across multi-step conversations. Read more here.

**14.****Agent Evaluation:** Tracks live performance to continuously score agents against live traffic using multi-turn autoraters that can evaluate the logic of an entire conversation, not just a single response. With turnkey dashboards and Agent Observability, you can visually trace complex reasoning to debug issues as they happen. Read more here.

**15.****Agent Optimizer**: Automatically clusters real-world failures and suggests refined system instructions to improve accuracy. Read more here.

**16.****Long-running agents:**Execute complex business processes that can work autonomously in secure cloud sandboxes, giving agents the ability to orchestrate business logic, write code to build custom tools, and complete multi-step work — without needing constant prompting. Read more here.

Then there’s Gemini Enterprise, the end-to-end system for the agentic era, which includes the Gemini Enterprise app and the following new capabilities:

**17. Agent Designer:**Uses the same no-code agent designer experience of Agent Platform and lets employees build sophisticated schedule- or trigger-based agents using any enterprise connector, and providing a virtual flowchart of your agent.

**18. Inbox in Gemini Enterprise:**Provides a central location to monitor, guide, and help manage all of your agent activity, including long-running agents. Notifications are categorized into actionable groups like "Needs your input," "Errors," and "Completed.”

**19. Projects:**Create a dedicated space where the agent’s memory is confined to the files and conversations your team adds, and connect it to data sources like Google Drive, NotebookLM, and Google Group Chats.

**20. Skills:**Create simple shortcuts using an “@” mention for repetitive tasks like applying brand guidelines, formatting a report, or accessing specific data.

**21. Canvas:**An interactive editor directly within Gemini Enterprise that lets teams easily create and edit Docs and Slides, and even export to Microsoft 365 files, within the same experience.

**22. Enhanced Deep Research agent:**Executes complex, multi-step research plans that autonomously synthesize information from the open web and internal company data.

**23. Dynamic and interactive Agent UI experiences:**Move beyond simple text chat with new support for the Agent-to-UI protocol (A2UI), enabling custom agents to dynamically generate rich, native UI components directly within the Gemini Enterprise app.

**24. High-code agents:** Allow your engineering teams and IT leaders to build sophisticated agents with full code and publish them directly into the Gemini Enterprise app for the business to use.

**25. Data Insights agent for unified analysis:** Uncovers deep patterns across your entire data landscape.

**26. Integrations for Bring Your Own Model Context Protocol (BYO-MCP):** Allows admins to securely connect the Gemini Enterprise app directly to your own custom or third-party business tools, internal workflows, and custom-built applications.

**27. Cross-platform unified intelligence:**Delivers unified intelligence across a fragmented data landscape where data lives in Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, or other business applications.

You can try the Gemini Enterprise App today by signing up here.

Our incredible AI **ecosystem** is also growing with Agent Gallery, where customers can browse a highly vetted set of agents built by our partners.

**28. Agent Gallery:**Provides access to new third-party agent sfrom partners including Accenture, Adobe, Atlassian, Deloitte, Lovable, Oracle, Palo Alto Networks, Replit, S&P Global, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Workday, and more.

AI and compute infrastructure

We announced the eighth generation Tensor Processing Units, or TPUs, which consist of:

**29. TPU 8t:** The training powerhouse, specifically designed for high-throughput AI workloads, delivering nearly 3x higher compute performance than the previous generation to shrink training timelines for massive models. Learn all about TPU 8t here.

**30. TPU 8i:**A breakthrough system for inference and reinforcement learning (RL) workloads, engineered to deliver the ultra-low latency and up to 80% better performance-per-dollar advantage for agentic workflows and Mixture of Experts (MoE) models compared to the previous generation. Go deep on TPU 8i here.

**31. Native PyTorch support for TPU, or TorchTPU:** With TorchTPU, you can run models on TPUs as they are, with full support for native PyTorch features like Eager Mode. Now in preview with select customers.

Whether you need a fully disconnected deployment, or want an integrated, Google-managed environment on your own hardware, (GDC) is the foundation of our sovereign neocloud architecture. Here’s the latest:

**32. NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs:** NVIDIA Blackwell (NVIDIA HGX B200) and NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra platforms (NVIDIA HGX B300) GPUs accelerate AI performance, leveraging fifth-gen NVIDIA NVLink to deliver data-center scale bandwidth directly to your environment.

**33. New machine families:**In addition to the N2 and N3 machine families for general-purpose workloads, GDC now supports the new A4 machine family for inference, and the memory-optimized M2 and M3 machine families for workloads that require higher memory-to-vCPU ratios.

**34. Enhanced storage:** GDC now supports 6PB object storage per zone — 6x the previous storage capacity. In addition, it now offers 30 IOPS/GB per zone, a 10x performance boost.

We also announced several new instances and features across our Compute Engine family:

**35. A5X with NVIDIA Vera Rubin platform:** A5X will be powered by NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 when it becomes available later this year, including concepts from the open-source Falcon networking protocol. Learn more here.

**36. Google Axion N4A:** Google’s custom Arm-based Axion CPU achieves up to 2x better price-performance than comparable current-generation x86-based VMs for cost-sensitive workloads, now GA. Read more here.

**37. Google Axion N4A supports GKE Agent Sandbox.** GKE Agent Sandbox lets agents safely execute untrusted code and tool calls, and running on Axion N4A instances provides up to 30% better price-performance than the next leading hyperscale cloud provider. Now GA. Read more here.

**38. Google Axion C4A.metal:**Our first Axion bare metal instance is designed to power Android development, automotive simulation, CI/CD pipelines, security workloads, and custom hypervisors.Now in preview. Read more here.

**39. C4 instances support for Intel Xeon 6 (Granite Rapids):**Achieve high-performance for AI workloads with Intel AMX and native FP16 support. C4 VMs are available with Intel Xeon 6 processors across all shapes. Read more here.

**40. Flexible CUDs****for more VM families:** Flex CUDs are now available for memory-optimized (M1-M4) and HPC-optimized (H3, H4D) VM families, as well as Cloud Run. Learn more here.

**41. C4N VMs:** For high-volume network applications, C4N with Titanium adapters provides nearly 400 Gbps of VM-to-VM bandwidth, and C4N with Hyperdisk Extreme provides 25 GiB/s of block storage throughput and nearly 1M IOPS. Now in preview; sign-up here.

**42. M4N instances:**Designed for memory-intensive databases, M4N with Hyperdisk Extreme offers 26.57 GiB of RAM per vCPU. Sign-up for the preview here.

**43. Z4D instances:**Optimize I/O-intensive workloads such as SQL, NoSQL, and vector databases with up to 84 TiB of high-performance local SSD directly on the node. Z4D virtual machines and bare metal instances will be in preview soon.

**44. Hyperdisk Balanced improvements:**Hyperdisk Balanced High Availability now offers a 4x performance improvement for high-availability databases like SQL Server or PostgreSQL by dynamically routing full-disk performance to the active VM. Learn more here.

**45. Hyperdisk ML performance improvements:**With 2 TiB/s of aggregate throughput (up from 1.2 TiB/s), Hyperdisk ML helps eliminate AI storage bottlenecks, with more than 200x higher throughput per disk than competitive offerings. Learn more here.

**46. Hyperdisk Exapools:** For large-scale training, Hyperdisk Exapools offer the highest aggregate block storage performance and capacity per AI cluster of any hyperscaler. Now GA, learn more here.

**47. Z4M:**For distributed parallel file systems and large-scale AI/ML workloads, Z4M provides up to 168 TiB of local SSD, up to 400 Gbps of network bandwidth, and support for RDMA. Z4M VMs and bare metal instances are expected in preview in Q3 2026.

If you want help deploying agents in your environment, you can partner with our experts for a diagnostic of your data and infrastructure by signing up here.

Agentic Data Cloud

As AI shifts from reactive intelligence to proactive action, legacy data architectures are breaking down under the agentic load. Our Agentic Data Cloud closes the gap between thinking and doing, merging analytical history with transactional power in a real-time loop, so your agents can securely act on your behalf. The Agentic Data Cloud comprises many products and platforms, starting with:

**48. Knowledge Catalog:** A universal context engine that maps and infers business meaning across your data estate using aggregation, enrichment, and search to help agents execute tasks accurately. Read all about Knowledge Catalog here.

**49. Deep Research Agent powered by the Knowledge Catalog:** Synthesizes business data, internal docs, and web research to autonomously answer your hardest, most complex questions.

**50. Zero-copy federation:** Provides direct access to data and context across applications, operating systems, and AI platforms — including Palantir, Salesforce Data360, SAP, ServiceNow, and Workday. Read more here.

**51. LookML Agent:** Autonomously reads strategy documents, spreadsheets, and reports to generate business-ready semantics, ensuring AI and analysts use the exact same enterprise definitions.

**52. BigQuery measures:** Redefines data consistency by embedding programmatic business logic directly into the SQL engine, ensuring calculations are reusable, accurate, and governed.

**53. Data Products:** Packages data assets with built-in intent, SLAs, and governance constraints. These self-contained intelligence blocks ground agents reliably in production.

**54. Reusable data quality rules:** Scales consistent, high-quality data governance by combining reusable, expert-defined test logic across multiple assets to ensure trusted data.

**55. Structured approval workflows:** Validates new business terms and data products with structured workflows, ensuring changes are verified by domain experts before reaching AI.

**56. Column-level lineage:** Tracks exactly where your agent's truth originated. We’ve expanded end-to-end lineage tracking to include Looker, plus column-level lineage for BigQuery and Spark.

An AI-native, cross-cloud lakehouse is another foundation element of the Agentic Data Cloud. Here’s what’s new in ours:

**57. Cross-cloud Lakehouse**(formerly BigLake)**:** Breaks down data silos with a borderless lakehouse. Powered by Iceberg REST Catalog, agents seamlessly access data across AWS, Azure, and a vast partner ecosystem.

**58. Lakehouse catalog federation:** Enables easy discovery, analysis, and zero-copy sharing of your data seamlessly across AWS Glue, Databricks, Snowflake, and SAP.

**59. Lightning Engine for Apache Spark:** Accelerates your agentic data science workloads with an engine that delivers up to 2x the price-performance over proprietary market alternatives. Read more here.

**60. Lakehouse federation for AlloyDB:** Enables live joins between your transactional data and massive historical analytical insights without moving data or building complex ETL pipelines.

**61. Managed Iceberg storage & REST Catalog:** Benefits from automatic management and multi-table transactions, plus read/write interoperability across BigQuery, Spark, and OSS engines.

**62. Cross-cloud caching:** This intelligent cache stores cross-cloud data on the first read to slash massive egress fees and accelerate follow-on queries for AWS and Azure data.

For practitioners, we announced several products with enhanced automation:

**63. Google Cloud Data Agent Kit:** A portable suite of skills, MCP tools, and plugins that turns environments like VS Code and Gemini CLI into native data workspaces that autonomously orchestrate outcomes. Read more here.

**64. Data Science Agent:** Simply state your goals in plain English to automatically execute complex plans for loading, cleaning, and visualizing data in BigQuery notebooks. Read more here.

**65. Data Engineering Agent:** Autonomously builds complex Dataform pipelines from scratch while enforcing governance rules and testing to keep bad data out of your production systems. Read more here.

**66. Database onboarding and observability agents:** Lets agents guide you through database provisioning, or proactively monitor health and execute automated troubleshooting across your database fleet. Read more here.

**67. Conversational Analytics:** Empowers teams to query complex datasets using natural language and publish custom analytical agents directly into Gemini Enterprise. Read more here.

We also announced new products and features across our database portfolio:

**68. Spanner Omni:** This edition brings Spanner’s globally consistent, multi-model database beyond Google Cloud. Run it anywhere — across multiple clouds, on-premises, or on your laptop. Read more here.

**69. Spanner Columnar Engine:** Accelerates analytical queries up to 200x on live operational data using vectorized execution, without impacting your production transactional workloads.

**70. Managed remote MCP servers for databases:** Securely manages the infrastructure to connect AI models directly to your operational data, eliminating the burden of hosting MCP servers.

**71. Vibe coding integrations with AI Studio:** Agent-led workflow that generates live applications from simple text prompts, easily connecting to trusted database services.

**72. Tools for Data Agents:** Modular building blocks that provide ready-to-use functions, like high-accuracy text-to-SQL, giving custom agents secure and direct database access.

**73. Bigtable in-memory:** A new hybrid storage architecture natively integrates frequently accessed data in-memory to deliver sub-millisecond read latency for real-time apps.

**74. Memorystore for Valkey 9.0:** Provides a fully managed migration path from self-managed Redis, complete with enterprise-grade security features like Access Control Lists (ACLs).

**75. AlloyDB AI-powered search at scale:** Scales enterprise search to 10 billion vectors using Google’s ScaNN index, offering up to 6x faster queries than standard PostgreSQL.

**76. New AI functions for AlloyDB:** Uses optimized modes for `ai.if`, `ai.analyze_sentiment`, and `ai.summarize` to embed Gemini’s powerful reasoning directly into database queries.

**77. Firestore full-text and geospatial search:** Google’s search technology is now natively integrated into Firestore, delivering highly relevant keyword and geospatial queries.

**78. Compute Engine-to-managed migrations:** Minimizes migration complexity with automated networking and replication to move PostgreSQL workloads to Cloud SQL or AlloyDB easily and securely.

**79. Database Center with BigQuery:** Monitors your entire data estate — from transactional databases to analytical warehouses — from a single management plane powered by Gemini fleet analytics.

BigQuery, now more than ever, is the linchpin of modern, agentic data analytics, and includes many new capabilities:

**80. Reverse ETL for BigQuery:** A one-click solution to sync heavy analytical insights from your lakehouse back to AlloyDB or Spanner for low-latency, high-QPS serving to end users. Read more here.

**81. BigQuery Graph:** Maps entities, relationships, and business logic directly within your data platform to anchor AI agents in a governed reality for complex reasoning tasks.

**82. BigQuery fluid scaling:** Executes highly variable, agentic workloads with per-second billing. This premier autoscaling model instantly adjusts resources.

**83. ObjectRef:** Processes unstructured data alongside structured data using SQL and Python. Build rich, multimodal context on your Knowledge Catalog without moving data.

**84. AI.PARSE_DOCUMENT:** Part of BigQuery AI, simplifies complex document processing with a single SQL function that automates OCR, layout parsing, and chunking using Gemini’s layout parser.

**85. TabularFM model:** Part of BigQuery AI, brings high-quality, zero-shot regression and classification natively to BigQuery without requiring extensive feature selection or model management.

**86. Optimized mode for SQL-first AI:** Part of BigQuery AI, trains task-specific models on the fly for functions like AI.CLASSIFY and AI.IF, delivering up to a 230x reduction in token consumption and cost.

**87. BigQuery-native Gemma embeddings:** Part of BigQuery AI, generates high-quality vector embeddings at scale on standard CPUs directly within your data warehouse to simplify enterprise AI preparation.

**88. Autonomous embedding generation:** Part of BigQuery AI, fully manages pipelines for unstructured data, automatically keeping vector indexes in sync asynchronously as new data is ingested at BigQuery scale.

**89. BigQuery hybrid search:** Part of BigQuery AI, unifies semantic and full-text search into a single powerful function to deliver superior retrieval precision for RAG and complex exploration tasks.

**90. Python UDF:** Part of BigQuery AI, enrich, transform, or clean data using fully managed Python scalar functions that autoscale serverlessly to millions of rows directly in BigQuery.

**91. Connected Sheets with TimesFM:** Part of BigQuery AI, brings the scale of BigQuery to Google Sheets, featuring state-of-the-art zero-shot forecasting with the TimesFM model and robust anomaly detection.

**92. Geospatial analytics datasets:** Part of BigQuery AI, combines native Google Earth AI and roads management data directly with your enterprise data for deep, real-world agentic analysis without wrangling.

**93. Proactive agentic workflows:** With BigQuery, agents can go beyond basic Q&A to detect metric shifts, perform root-cause analysis, and deliver scheduled research briefings directly to your inbox.

**94. BigQuery Agent Analytics plugins:** Logs detailed interactions from frameworks like ADK and LangGraph directly to BigQuery to audit, troubleshoot, and optimize long-term agent performance.

**95. BigQuery Studio productivity tools:** Brings a contextually aware assistant, SQL and Visualization Cells, Files Explorer, and Git workflows directly into BigQuery.

**96. Advanced runtime, small query, and history-based optimizations:** These BigQuery optimizations have accelerated performance by 35% year-over-year while cutting processing costs.

**97. New BigQuery workload management features:** Granular cost controls arrive with reservation groups, dynamic assignments, and project-level slot controls, simplified by rules-based management.

**98. Colab Data Apps:** Transforms your notebook analyses into shareable, fully managed interactive Python applications that business teams can access directly from Data Studio.

With Looker Business Intelligence, you get not just agentic AI, but agentic BI. Here’s the latest:

**99. Data Studio (formerly Looker Studio):** Available in Free and Pro versions, this data visualization engine now also provides a unified interface to browse data sources, apps, and agents. Read more here.

**100. Looker Dashboard Agents:**Transforms static views into interactive hubs. Ask natural language questions within dashboards for instant summaries and context-aware, governed answers.

**101. Agentic Workflows in Looker:**Moves beyond reactive queries to proactive results. Agents monitor critical metrics for irregularities and identify hidden correlations so you can instantly address business shifts.

**102. Embedded conversational experiences in Looker:**Leverages Looker's API and SDK to integrate Gemini-powered, multi-turn conversational experiences into custom data applications and internal workflows.

**103. Looker self-service explores:**Blends personal files with enterprise data using an updated AI-Explore experience that automatically generates LookML, giving you the agility of a spreadsheet with enterprise governance.

**104. Looker AI assistants**: Simplifies BI with Visualization, Expression, and Insight Assistants. Use natural language to create charts, generate custom filters, and automatically summarize key trends.

**105. Open BI and MCP:** Empowers external AI agents to autonomously query and analyze data. We offer both open-source MCP via the MCP Toolbox and an all-new Google-managed MCP server that’s native to Looker for ease of management.

**106. Continuous Integration:** In Looker, automates SQL validation and content testing within your development workflow to identify potentially breaking changes before they reach production, for reliable model updates.

Application development, management and runtime platforms

Cloud Run, Google’s fully managed application platform, now supports:

**107. Full-stack apps in Google AI Studio**: Build and deploy apps vibe-coded in AI Studio, including a Firestore database and user authentication, to Cloud Run, now GA.

**108. Integration with Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform:**Through its integration with Cloud Run, Agent Platform helps you transition agents from experimental environments into fully managed, production-grade systems. Now in preview with select customers.

**109. Fully managed remote MCP server:**Enable easy deployments from developers and agents, now GA.

**110. NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs**:Run high-end inference on Cloud Run — up to 70B+ parameter models — without having to manage any underlying GPU infrastructure, and scaling to zero when the resource is not in use.

**111. Billing caps**: Define your maximum spend per month, after which point, Cloud Run resources are de-activated. Coming soon.

**112. Cloud Run instances:**Host long-running background jobs, in preview to select customers.

**113. Cloud Run sandboxes:**Spin up an ephemeral sandbox that’s strictly isolated from your agent code using a built-in `sandbox` tool, coming soon.

**114. SSH:** Gain secure shell access (SSH) directly into a running Cloud Run container, now in preview with select customers.

**115. Cloud Run service bindings:**Service-to-service communication for scalable microservices architectures, coming soon.

**116. Ephemeral disk:** Now in preview, ephemeral disk storage is created when an instance starts and deleted when it stops.

And for mobile and web developers, we added new capabilities to Firebase, our premier platform for client developers:

**117. Firebase SQL Connect****:** Firebase Data Connect is now Firebase SQL Connect, letting you connect your mobile and web client apps to the power of for PostgreSQL, now with support for realtime syncing, offline cache, and native SQL— all available via a no-cost trial.

**118. Firebase integration with Application Design Center:**The new Firebase integration with Application Design Center (ADC) offers a unified model for deploying and managing the resources used by your mobile and web client apps, such as Firestore, App Check, Authentication, and Firebase AI Logic, in the same way you manage the rest of your Google Cloud infrastructure.

**119. Firestore Enterprise edition**: Introducing native full-text search, geospatial queries, relational-style JOIN using subqueries, and a robust data manipulation language (DML) as part of the new query engine in Firestore Enterprise.

**120. Firebase AI Logic**: Build generative AI features directly into your mobile and web client apps with no server-side setup. New features, like auto function calling and JSON schema mapping, help reduce technical overhead and give you more control to optimize your resources and costs. Read more here.

**121. Firebase Phone Number Verification:** Helps onboard new users to your app by retrieving the phone number assigned to the SIM in a device over cellular or WiFi. Now supported by 10+ carriers across six regions.

Then, there’s Google Kubernetes Engine, or GKE, which has emerged as the platform of choice for complex, demanding AI and agentic applications. Here’s what’s new in GKE:

**122. GKE Agent Sandbox:**A GKE add-on based on the open-source Agent Sandbox controller project that manages isolated, stateful, and single-replica workloads on GKE, optimized for AI agent runtimes. Learn more here.

**123. GKE hypercluster:** A single, conformant GKE control plane to manage millions of accelerators across Google Cloud regions, in private GA.

**124. Predictive latency boost** in GKE Inference Gateway: Reduce time-to-first-token latency by up 70% by replacing heuristic guesswork with real-time capacity-aware routing — no manual tuning required. In preview. Learn more here.

**125. Automatic KV Cache storage tiering** across RAM, Local SSD, and Google Cloud Storage/Lustre, solving long-context memory bottlenecks. Learn more here.

**126. RL Scheduler**: Solve for the "straggler effect" and inter-batch tail latency, maximizing throughput via intelligent routing. More here.

**127. RL Sandbox:**Kernel-level isolation for tool-calling and reward evaluation with millisecond-scale provisioning.

**128. RL Observability and Reliability dashboards**: The deep visibility you need to troubleshoot and optimize the entire RL loop instantly, out of the box. See more here.

**129. Scaling on custom metrics:** Support for intent-based autoscaling on triggers besides CPU and memory. Learn more here.

**130. Accelerated node and pod startup:** GKE nodes now start up to 4x faster, while pod startup times have been slashed by up to 80%. Learn more here.

**131. Rapid model loading:** Leveraging the run:AI Model Streamer and Rapid Cache in Google Cloud Storage, models now load 5x faster, removing a traditional storage bottleneck. Learn more here.

Developers and operators, get ready for the next generation of Gemini Cloud Assist, our AI-assisted cloud operations platform. Be on the lookout for:

**132. Redesigned****Application Design Center:**Using natural language and the power of Gemini, reduce the time from architecture design to deployment of new or existing multi-resource environments.

**133. Support for gcloud, kubectl, and Terraform:**Automate infrastructure operations while using proactive multi-turn agents to troubleshoot and resolve incidents.

**134. Proactive cost anomalies detection:**A new FinOps agent analyzes spending spikes and generates granular cost reports on demand.

**135. MCP servers:**Get help wherever you work, including in your integrated development environment (IDE), CLI, or third-party tools with MCP servers for Gemini Cloud Assist’s design, operations, troubleshooting and optimization capabilities. Read more here.

Whatever your preferred Google Cloud management interface, you’ll find a variety of new features:

**136. App-centric visibility for Unified Maintenance:** Gives a consolidated view of maintenance events across your entire application landscape, moving from resource-level to business-level visibility. Learn more here.

**137. Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) feature flags:** Decouples your feature releases from code deployments to enable safe, targeted rollouts and instant rollbacks. Learn more here.

**138. FinOps Explainability agent:**Autonomously investigates the drivers of your AI-related cloud costs. This is in addition to new FinOps tooling which provides commercial auditability. Get started here.

**139. Spend Caps:** In private preview, FinOps and DevOps managers can set budgets and enforce cost boundaries at the project level for Google AI Studio, Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, Cloud Run, Cloud Run Functions, and Maps. These caps alert and ultimately pause API traffic once your set budget is reached. Sign up for the preview here.

Customers

The real impact of these new capabilities is in the value they bring to our customers. We updated our running list of AI customer stories with more than 300 new entries, bringing the total to 1,302!

We also talked about several new customer use cases:

**140. Capcom** worked with Google Cloud to build agents that improve the gameplay experience, freeing developers for creative work. These specialized AI agents — including visual inspection, predictive and institutional knowledge agents — support the highly complex process of playtesting.

**141. Citi Wealth** is launching Citi Sky, an always-on AI-powered agent for customers to access market insights, act on opportunities, and engage with their advisors. Citi Sky is conversational and multilingual for a more intuitive, responsive and personalized wealth experience.

**142. Citadel Securities** built a scalable, cloud-based research environment that uses TPUs to run AI workloads up to 4x faster with 30% lower costs. Work that used to take days is now executed in minutes.

**143. Deutsche Telekom** announced MINDR, a multi-agent system built on Gemini models that enables autonomous, self-healing network operations across multiple domains to resolve network issues before they impact customers. MINDR reduces event management times by more than 95%.

**144. GE Appliances** is deploying more than 800 AI agents with Gemini Enterprise across its manufacturing, logistics, and supply chain operations.

**145. Highmark Health** scaled employee impact with Sidekick, an AI assistant that has delivered $27.9 million in value in 2025 alone by automating research protocols and providing "AI search proxies" for internal teams.

**146. Home Depot** created Magic Apron, a sophisticated digital agent built on Gemini Enterprise for Customer Experience that brings the brand’s "Orange Apron" expertise to every customer, and a new AI-powered phone agent that allows customers to skip complicated phone menus — identifying needs in under 10 seconds.

**147. Macy’s** created “Ask Macy’s,” a new digital shopping concierge and a leap forward in multimodal, agentic AI shopping powered by Gemini Enterprise for Customer Experience. Far beyond a chat bot, this multimodal agent is capable of handling text and images, and it also has a unique virtual try-on feature.

**148. Mars** selected Gemini Enterprise as the primary AI operating system for its global workforce. The company is providing its associates with a suite of agentic capabilities, including sophisticated AI assistants designed to handle complex, multistep tasks that can help them work more efficiently and creatively.

**149. Merck** will deploy a new agentic platform across their research and development, manufacturing, commercial and corporate operations. Core to the work will be digitizing data and boosting productivity for Merck’s 75,000 employees worldwide.

**150. Papa John’s**is the first user of the Food Ordering agent in Gemini Enterprise for Customer Experience. The agent features a unified voice-and-text AI ordering system, , while integration with the Omnichannel Gateway helps the agent remember customer preferences and past orders and get food to the door faster.

**151. Tata Steel**is rapidly scaling autonomous capabilities across its vast global organization, deploying a fleet of more than 300 specialized AI agents in just nine months to drive efficiency and precision across its global operations. These include a low-code platform for easy agent deployment and a digital assistant for informed decision-making.

**152. Unilever**is designing and deploying agents at scale — safely, securely, and globally — to transform how they serve billions of customers. Using Agent Platform, Unilever has developed a multi-agentic solution to help procurement teams make quicker and smarter buying decisions.

**153. Virgin Voyages**’ new Rovey agent is a personal concierge for the high seas, powered by Gemini Enterprise and Google Distributed Cloud. Rovey makes sure the crew has the latest, most on-brand information 24/7, and even on ships with limited connectivity at sea, Google Distributed Cloud keeps everything connected.

**154. Vodafone Business** is launching a managed detection and response service enabled by Google Security Operations, and the Vodafone Business AI Concierge with Google Gemini. The detection and response service will further protect Vodafone’s customers from increasingly frequent and sophisticated cyber threats.

Powering many of these organization’s new agents is Gemini Enterprise for Customer Experience, which comes with new agents and capabilities:

**155. Shopping agent**and **Food Ordering agent:**Bring new conversational sales and ordering capabilities direct to businesses and third-party chat and digital interfaces.

**156. Omnichannel Gateway:**Helps agents maintain context across web, mobile, and voice, so a company’s agents can offer more personalized service.

**157. Agent Assist:**For the most complex customer service situations, coaches employees to deliver fast and more accurate answers to customer questions with organizational data readily available through generative AI grounding.

Networking

We also announced a variety of enhancements to the broader Cross-Cloud Network family:

**158. Virgo Network:** A scale-out fabric for modern AI workloads. Built on high-radix switches that allow more ports per switch, it delivers massive bisection bandwidth and deterministic low latency for distributed training and serving workloads. Check out the deep dive.

**159. Agent Gateway partnerships:** Allows customers to integrate their trusted vendors to help secure agentic communications. Includes partner solutions from Broadcom, Check Point, Cisco, CrowdStrike, Exabeam, F5, Netskope, Okta, Palo Alto Networks, Ping Identity, Saviynt, Silverfort, Thales, and Zscaler. In preview soon.

**160. Ambient networking:**This new integrated data plane for GKE and Cloud Run provides service discovery, zero-trust access, and traffic management without the need for complex and resource-heavy sidecar proxies. Now in preview.

**161. Service bindings:**Enabled by ambient networking, service bindings automatically establish service-to-service connectivity between agentic applications and services.

**162. Network Services Monitoring:**Also enabled by ambient networking, the preview of Network Services Monitoring bridges application and network observability gaps for faster root-cause analysis and simplified troubleshooting.

**163. Multi-region support in GKE Inference Gateway:**Scale inference services across regions, for cross-regional failover, optimized utilization, and reduced global latency. In preview.

**164. GKE Inference Gateway disaggregated serving:**C hoose between vLLM and SGLang for model serving by leveraging llm-d’s SGLang support. Now GA.

**165. Accelerator network profiles**: Set up accelerator-equipped GKE node pools with DRANET, and improve the bandwidth for distributed AI/ML workloads by up to 60%. Now GA.

**166. Cloud Interconnect****400 Gbps circuits**: Use up to 3.2 Tbps in a single connection. Now GA.

**167. Partner Cross-Cloud Interconnect:** GA for AWS; in preview soon for CoreWeave and Lumen.

**168. Ultra Low Latency Solution for financial exchanges:**In partnership with CME Group, this fully managed cloud environment will allow CME Group and its clients to migrate core trading systems to Google Cloud. Now in preview.

**169. Cloud Network Insights:** Network performance monitoring (NPM) and digital experience monitoring (DEM) enabled by Broadcom AppNeta to reduce the mean time to detect and mitigate network-related agent, application, and API issues. Now in preview.

**170. Private Service Connect published services:** Enable secure private global access to your managed services through 40+ Google and third-party published services. Read more here.

**171. Private Service Connect endpoint-based security:**Use granular authorization policies for producer-to-consumer service communications, now in preview.

**172. Cloud Number Registry:**Now in preview, this agentic IPAM solution finds free IP ranges, tracks utilization, and allocates resources. It also integrates with Infoblox Universal DDI for Cross-Cloud Network IPAM discovery and enforcement.

**173. Hybrid Subnets:**Migrate legacy workloads from on-premises to a VPC without needing to change hard-coded IP addresses. GA.

**174. Cloud NAT:**Connect IPv6-only workloads to private IPv4 destinations using the combined power of DNS64 and private NAT64. In preview soon.

**175. Granular networking charge visibility:** Cost Explorer and the new App Optimize API now provide attribution of associated data transfer costs to the originating resources for Google Cloud products, in preview soon.

**176. Gemini Cloud Assist network security agent:** Streamlines network security operations with policy generation, recommendations, and impact analysis. In preview soon.

**177. Gemini Cloud Assist network agent:**Optimizes workload placement for performance and reliability, Private Service Connect troubleshooting, and also provides advanced cost estimation for observability services. In preview soon.

**178. Network observability MCP tools and agent skills:** Partners can build agents to leverage connectivity tests, query VPC Flow Logs in natural language. In preview.

As part of Cross-Cloud Network, new capabilities in Global Front End include:

**179. Global Front End Enterprise for simplified consumption:** Combining capabilities from global Cloud Load Balancing, Google Cloud Armor, Cloud CDN, and Service Extensions with up to 15% lower TCO. In preview soon. Learn more here.

**180. Post quantum cryptography (PQC):**Helps secure your workloads with industry-standard algorithms that provide a layered defense against both classical and quantum adversaries. Learn more here.

**181. Google tag gateway:** This allows advertisers to serve tags from their own domain, which can significantly improve the accuracy and resilience of measurement signals. GA soon.

**182. Image optimization in Cloud CDN:**Deliver content that best fits your end users’ screens and save on bandwidth costs (in preview soon).

**183. Cloud CDN GKE Gateway support:**Enable and manage caching services using GKE APIs, now GA.

Cloud WAN is a fully managed, reliable global backbone to connect your enterprise, and includes the following new capabilities:

**184. Expanded geographic reach:**Network Connectivity Center’s site-to-site data transfer is now available in over 25 countries. Read more here.

**185. NCC Gateway:**Use third-party secure service edge (SSE) integrations from Palo Alto Networks (GA soon) and Symantec (preview).

**186. Expanded Verified Peering Provider program:**Get highly reliable internet connectivity to Google through 175+ providers worldwide. Read more here.

**187. Last mile connectivity**: Provision site-to-cloud private connectivity in minutes with preferred partners from the Google Cloud console. In preview soon.

We added new capabilities in our AI-powered network security offerings to protect against evolving threats.

**188. Cloud Armor managed rules**: Available in preview, and powered by Thales Imperva, detects Layer 7 application attacks and zero-day vulnerabilities.

**189. Cloud Armor adaptive protection for Network Load Balancers and VMs:**Advanced machine learning to L3/L4 traffic, to detect and mitigate volumetric DDoS attacks. In preview soon.

**190. Cloud Armor visual rule builder:**Makes custom rule creation easier with a simplified user experience, in preview soon. Read more here.

**191. Cloud NGFW****Internal Application and proxy Network Load Balancer support:** Helps enforce consistent, service-centric security for abstracted services like GKE, Cloud Run, and Private Service Connect traffic. In preview.

**192. Cloud NGFW project-level policies:**Creates and manages Cloud NGFW endpoints, security profiles, and security profile groups at the project level. In preview soon.

**193. Cloud NGFW Advanced Malware Sandbox**: In preview later this year, helps defend against highly evasive zero-day threats. This capability is powered by Palo Alto Networks Advanced Wildfire, trained on data from more than 70,000 Palo Alto Networks customers to stop 99% of known and unknown malware.

We added new functionality to , our hub for managing global connectivity:

**194. Support for static routes:** By using an internal load balancer as the next hop, you can integrate Secure Web Proxy and third-party network security virtual appliances. Now GA. Learn more .

**195. Support for privately used public IP (PUPI):** Allows the exchange of PUPI IPv4 addresses with VPC spokes and producer VPC spokes, now GA. Learn more .

Partners

A huge part of Google Cloud’s success is built on our partner ecosystem, which helps conceive, build, and implement solutions for our joint customers. To strengthen this partner partnership, we made a number of important announcements, most of which are detailed here.

**196. $750 million innovation fund:**Investing in partners with new models, tools, engineering support, and incentives to accelerate agent development and deployment globally for every business process, function, and industry.

**197. Sell****partner agents in Gemini Enterprise**: The new Agent Marketplace with the Agent Gallery of Gemini Enterprise allows partners, startups, and more to sell their agents directly to other enterprise users.

**198. 70-plus partner-built agents in Agent Marketplace:**We’re launching the Agent Marketplace with more than 70 pre-built agents. Discover and manage specialized AI from partners like Accenture, Adobe, Atlassian, Deloitte, and more. Read more here.

**199. Partnering on forward deployed engineers:**Google Cloud will make its engineering talent available for the customers of select partners, like Accenture, Deloitte, and McKinsey, who are also establishing advanced engineering practices.

**200. Deeper model integration:** Palantir joins many of the leading SaaS and AI platforms already featuring Gemini access, while Box, DocuSign, Oracle, Salesforce, and SAP have added Gemini features in more of their agents and tools.

**201. AI-powered features in Google Cloud Partner Network:** A new partner agent and agentic features in the Earnings Hub and Partner Finder help partners amplify their impact for joint customers.

**202. New Unified Data Foundation with SAP**: Integrates SAP and non-SAP data into a bi-directional source of truth, helping power AI workflows and deliver data-driven value. Zero-copy data sharing opens up access to outside platforms securely.

**203. More SAP news:** We also unveiled new Gemini features in SAP Engagement Cloud, solution accelerators in Cortex Framework, and support for SAP Sovereign applications. Read all our SAP announcements here.

**204. Oracle AI Database@Google Cloud expansion:** Our recently launched Oracle data connectors are expanding to 20 regions, offer new AI capabilities, feature Oracle GoldenGate support for near real-time data replication to BigQuery and Knowledge Catalog integration, and more. Read more here.

**205. Partners of the year:** Celebrating hundreds of partners across specialties, industries, and geographies. See them all here.

Security

From security operations, to fraud detection, to cryptography and key management, there was a ton of security news at Next ‘26.

**206. Threat hunting agent in Google Security Operations:**Helps teams proactively hunt for novel attack patterns and stealthy adversary behaviors that bypass traditional defenses.

**207. Detection Engineering agent Google Security Operations:**Identifies coverage gaps and creates new detections for threat scenarios, reducing toil and transforming detection creation from a manual craft into an automated science.

**208. Third-Party Context agent Google Security Operations:**Enriches your workflows with contextual data from third-party content.

**209. Google Security Operations**: A robust cohort of new partner integrations for Google Security Operations has been designed to deliver high-fidelity security workflows right out of the box. Our latest participating Google Cloud Security integration ecosystem partners include Darktrace, Gigamon, and SAP. Read more here.

**210. Model Armor:**Now integrated with Agent Gateway, Agent Runtime, andLangchain available in preview, and Firebase, generally available, to help developers add inline enforcement and sanitization of agent traffic and interactions without the need to change code. These integrations expand Model Armor's protection against runtime risks such as prompt injections, tool poisoning, and sensitive data leakage across Google Cloud services and our AI portfolio. Learn more here.

**211. Google Cloud Fraud Defense**: Now generally available, we’re evolving reCAPTCHA into a comprehensive platform designed to secure the agentic web by discerning the legitimacy and authorization of bots, humans, and agents. Using the same scale and signals that protect Google’s own ecosystem, Fraud Defense will soon offer in preview agent-specific capabilities for human users and AI agents that can help secure the digital commerce journey, from account creation and login to payment and checkout. Learn more here.

**212. Chrome Enterprise**: Now in preview, AI-aware extension threat detections can surface advanced extension telemetry that helps security teams detect and respond to anomalous AI agent activity. Learn more here.

**213. Chrome Enterprise**: Generally available soon, new shadow AI reporting can help you gain visibility into the shadow AI landscape by flagging employee use of unsanctioned web-based AI and SaaS applications. Learn more here.

**214. Identity and Access Management**: To help achieve least privilege quickly and simply, we’ve streamlined our predefined roles catalog with easy-to-use administrator, editor, and viewer roles, such as the IAM role picker and the ability to re-authenticate sensitive actions.

**215. Confidential Computing support for G4 VMs**: In partnership with NVIDIA, Confidential Computing support for G4 VMs is available in preview globally, featuring NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs on Compute Engine Confidential G4 VMs, to help strengthen confidentiality and integrity for a wide spectrum of sensitive AI workloads. Learn more .

**216. C4 Confidential VMs**:In partnership with Intel, we’re also introducing the preview of C4 Confidential VMs**,** bringing Intel TDX to 6th Gen Xeon processors to help protect diverse AI and analytics workloads while providing industry-leading compute density and performance.

**217. Cloud Key Management Services (KMS)**: Available in preview, the new Confidential External Key Manager (cEKM) can give you the flexibility to host and protect external keys in any region and maintain verifiable control in a confidential environment.

**218. Post-quantum cryptography (PQC)**: Available in preview, KMS Quantum Safe Key Imports can help you bring your own keys with quantum-safe algorithms.

**219. Secret Manager**: Generally available, the native integration of our Secret Manager with Agent Development Kit can help prevent password leaks and mitigate prompt injection risks.

Google has completed its acquisition of Wiz. By bringing two industry leaders together, we are building a comprehensive, AI-ready cybersecurity platform designed to protect your organization across all your cloud environments.

Wiz is constantly expanding and deepening your ability to adopt AI quickly and securely, with the following new capabilities:

**220. Support for agent studios**: Now supports Databricks as well as new agent studios like AWS Agentcore, Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, Microsoft Azure Copilot Studio, and Salesforce Agentforce to help customers gain visibility however their teams choose to build. Read more here.

**221. Security detections updates from Wiz Defend**: We updated how we integrate security detections from Wiz Defend with Google Security Operations and Mandiant Threat Defense to help analysts more easily configure automatic threat information forwarding.

**222. Vibe coding integration:**Generally available in May, Wiz can help secure vibe-coded applications. This new integration runs Wiz security scanning directly inside the Lovable platform so vulnerabilities, secrets, and misconfigurations caught by Wiz are surfaced in Lovable's built-in security view.

**223. Inline AI security hooks**: Integrates Wiz directly into integrated development environments (IDEs) and agent workflows to evaluate prompts and scan AI-generated output instantly, injecting security guardrails before code is committed.

**224. Wiz Skills:**Help agent-based remediation by equipping coding agents and AI-native IDEs with full code-to-cloud context and validated attack surface findings from the Wiz Security Graph. These capabilities enable teams to trigger automated, agent-driven remediation workflows locally from the developer's individual IDE and globally at the repository and pull request level in your version control system.

**225. AI-Bill of Materials**: To help eliminate shadow AI**,**Wiz’s dynamic AI-Bill of Materialsautomatically inventories all AI frameworks, models, and IDE extensions across your environment. This helps provide visibility into what is writing code across your stack, allowing you to track sanctioned corporate tools like Gemini Code Assist and GitHub Copilot while simultaneously uncovering unapproved shadow AI plugins.

Storage

Enhancements to Google Cloud’s storage offerings span high-performance storage infrastructure, smart storage, new management capabilities, and expanded ecosystem offerings.

**226. Rapid Bucket:**As part of the new Cloud Storage Rapid family of high-performance object storage, Rapid Bucket delivers more than 15 TB/s of bandwidth, 20 million requests per second, and sub-millisecond latency in a single zonal bucket. Now GA; read more here.

**227. Rapid Cache:**Formerly Anywhere Cache, Rapid Cache accelerates bandwidth for bursty workloads, delivering an aggregate read throughput of 2.5 TB/s for existing buckets, with no code changes. Learn more here.

**228. Rapid Cache ingest-on-write:** Get up to 2.2x faster checkpoint restores, allowing training clusters to recover faster from interruptions. Learn more.

**229. Increased throughput for Google Cloud Managed Lustre:**With up to 10 TB/s of throughput, Managed Lustre writes and restores checkpoints 2.6x faster than other Google Cloud storage solutions. Learn more.

**230. Managed Lustre Dynamic tier:** Low-latency performance for intense AI workloads like training and checkpointing, offered at $0.06/GB-month.

**231. Managed Lustre support for new TPUDirect and RDMA:** Minimize latency by allowing data to bypass the host, moving directly to the accelerators. Learn more here.

**232. Smart storage object context:**Now GA, this metadata substrate adds structured, mutable, IAM-governed context to every object. Learn more.

**233. Smart storage automated annotations:** Unlock unstructured data with automated metadata annotation.

**234. Cloud Storage MCP server:**Read, write, and analyze Cloud Storage data using the standard MCP protocol. Learn more.

**235. Storage Intelligence zero-configuration dashboards:**Surface cost anomalies and integrate Security Command Center’s Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) data governance feature, to detect security vulnerabilities across Cloud Storage. Now in preview.

**236. Storage Intelligence object events and bucket activity****tables:** Available in Insights Datasets, use these new tables to, for example, optimize bucket placement based on egress patterns, or quickly troubleshoot 429 errors.

**237. Enhanced batch operations in Storage Intelligence:**New change ACL and storage class operations make it simpler to act on billions of objects, and adds support for multi-bucket operations.

**238. Google Cloud NetApp Volumes:** With new Flex Unified, provision both block (iSCSI, NVMe/TCP) and file (NFS/SMB) on the same storage pool. New ONTAP-mode lets you bring your existing automation (Terraform, Ansible) and ONTAP APIs directly to NetApp Volumes.

**239. Filestore for GKE:** Developers building AI workloads on GKE can start small, with shares as small as 100 GiB, and scale capacity and IOPS independently. Tighter integration with Colossus provides more scale and enterprise capabilities.

**240. Google Cloud Backup and DR agentic AI capabilities:** Let these agents autonomously audit your backup estate and remediate coverage gaps, with new GA integrations for AlloyDB and Filestore.

Startups

Startups are building on Google Cloud for our models, purpose-built infrastructure, and unique security solutions. You can read more about some of the exciting new ones, and new startup programs, here.

**241. Notable startups using Google Cloud:** We announced dozens of new startups using our services or expanding with us, including Lovable, Notion, Proximal Health, Gamma, Mavvrik, Insilica, and Parrallel.

**242. Access to NVIDIA hardware:**A number of leading startups use Google Cloud for training and inference workloads on NVIDIA chips, including Thinking Machines, Interfact, Nucleus AI, Reflection, and Neuraldefend.

**243. Global Gemini Startup Forum:**This June, we’re hosting a two-day, in-depth gathering of founders from seed to Series A startups; attendees will engage with Google leaders and engineers, build and scale products, and share feedback.

**244. Google for Startups AI Agents Challenge:** Open to anyone, this global competition runs for six weeks and gives teams $500 in credits and tools — like the new Agent Platform — to build autonomous systems and compete for a $90,000 prize pool.

**245. New gen media report:** Our Future of AI: Perspectives on generative media for Startups report compiles exclusive interviews with eight startup founders, investors, and Googlers.

Workspace

Google Workspace with Gemini is where work happens for over 3 billion users and more than 13 million customers — from solopreneurs to small businesses to the Fortune 500. We introduced new innovations that transform how people work with AI, including:

**246. Workspace Intelligence:**Unified, real-time understanding to power agentic work, by understanding complex semantic relationships within Workspace apps (such as Docs, Slides, or Gmail), active projects, collaborators, and your organization's domain knowledge. See it here.

**247. Ask Gemini in Chat:** Acts as a unified command line for all of your work; simply state your goal and Gemini can complete tasks, generate documents or slides, or find files using just a description.

**248. New Gemini capabilities in Sheets, Docs, and Slides:** Build or edit entire spreadsheets using natural language, collaborate with Gemini in Docs to create infographics grounded in your data or edit based on comment feedback, and create full, editable slide decks in one shot.

**249. AI Inbox and AI Overviews in Gmail:** Get a clear, streamlined look at what’s most important in your inbox and use AI Overviews in Gmail search to get answers without digging.

**250. New Gemini capabilities in Drive:** Use AI Overviews and Ask Gemini to find information fast and get detailed insights about all of your files, and use Drive Projects to organize your files and emails, ensuring your colleagues and Gemini have the full context.

**251. Third-party data in Sheets:**Import third-party data from platforms like HubSpot and Salesforce toGemini in Sheets, and create interactive visualizations — such as dashboards and kanban boards — directly within the new Sheets canvas.

**252. Workspace skills:**Organizations can now deploy agentic automation across workflows using skills. Collaboratively build and share skills in Workspace Studio, then invoke them wherever you use Gemini in Workspace.

**253. Custom Avatars in Vids****:**Add branding elements to custom avatars — everything from a company logo on a shirt to a fully branded backdrop. And you can soon add avatars when youconvert a presentation into a video.

**254. Help from Gemini in every meeting:**We’re expanding Take Notes for Me in Google Meet to capture automated meeting summaries and action items for any meeting, whether it’s in-person, or hosted on another provider like Zoom or Teams.

**255. Workspace capabilities in the Gemini Enterprise app:**Coming to private preview, customers will soon also be able to schedule Google Calendar meetings and seamlessly create, view, and edit Docs and Slides directly from canvas mode in the Gemini Enterprise app.

**256. Auto browse with Gemini in Chrome:**Workspace customers in the US can now turn on the new Gemini auto browse capabilities in Chrome Enterprise. Learn more here.

**257. Workspace MCP Server:**The new Workspace MCP Server, available in preview, lets developers bring advanced Workspace capabilities such as synthesizing Drive documents and drafting Gmail responses into their AI applications and agents. Learn more here.

**258. Simplified agent governance:**New agent governance controls, such as AI control center, agent management, and Workspace Studio controls, help you monitor, control, and audit agent access to your data in Workspace to reduce indirect prompt injection, oversharing, and data loss risks.

**259. New sovereign controls and client-side encryption:** To meet regulatory requirements, you can lock data processing and storage to the US and EU, with more countries supported in the future, such as Germany and India. And for your most sensitive data, client-side encryption lets you deny access to any agent and any entity, including Google.

**260. Improved migration and interoperability features:** Migrating your entire organization from Microsoft 365 to Workspace with a new cloud service that lets you easily move emails, files, and conversations. Improved interoperability features allow collaboration with customers and partners who use Office apps.

A big thank you to all of our customers, partners, and attendees who joined us on the ground or tuned in virtually. We’ll see you next year for Cloud Next ‘27 on April 13-15 in Las Vegas!

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