Google Cloud Next 2025: A look back at Alphabet's biggest conference

Contents

Google Cloud Next is bigger than Google I/O. While an average of 5,000 people travel to California for the Alphabet developer meeting, where new end customer products such as Pixel smartphones are regularly presented, there are six times as many at the 3-day event of the cloud subsidiary: an average of almost 30,000 people. Accordingly, the journey to the keynote presentation at the Mandalay Bay Resort at the southern end of the Las Vegas Strip feels like being in Tokyo's Shinjuku Station at rush hour. Dozens of Google Cloud employees lead the way through the long corridors to the event hall. This time, the logistics were so cleverly organized that a priority lane was set up just for the press, allowing us to pass the necessary security checks relatively quickly and get to our seats.

Just how important Google Cloud Next is for Alphabet is shown by the fact that Alphabet boss Sundar Pichai is on stage alongside Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian, as well as numerous other Google employees and customers. Of course, AI is and remains the main topic, even if this year you get the feeling that a certain realism has taken hold. Whereas previously people were still looking for practical applications, the hype is still there, but you can tell that companies are expecting a return on investment, whether it's by speeding up development, AI-fizing marketing or simplifying customer support.

AI nerds hear the killers

The fact that cloud and SaaS events become huge shows is nothing new. Amazon Web Services is also making a big splash with re:Invent, which is even running for five days and is taking place in December in the gigantic Venetian Hotel at the other end of the Strip with its indoor boat channels. And the Salesforce conference Dreamforce in San Francisco is legendary when it comes to top artists for the supporting program – U2, Foo Fighters, most recently even Elton John. This year, Google brought its AI nerds The Killers and rapper Wyclef Jean as party DJs, and once again rented the Las Vegas Raiders football stadium.

Nevertheless, the atmosphere in 2025 was a little weird. The back and forth about the US government's tariffs (and the rollercoaster ride on the stock market) were on everyone's lips. You got the feeling that some Google Cloud employees on stage at the press conferences were indirectly apologizing for this. It was emphasized that the company operates locations and data centers all over the world and is a central element of the planet's Internet infrastructure. Las Vegas itself also felt a little more hospitable than usual: from the friendly customs officer at immigration to the attentive service at Starbucks and the Uber driver who was eager to find out how US developments were viewed from Europe.

TPUs and special effects

The most interesting thing about Cloud Next is that, as a reporter, you get to deal directly with the movers and shakers. I can talk to the boss of BigQuery, for example, or to one of the main people responsible for Workspace. Even the interviews with Google Cloud customers are not boring and full of praise for Google's AI portfolio, but offer insights into how AI is actually being used in companies today. And of course, there was also new hardware and software: Google's new Ironwood TPU, which is said to be 3600 times faster (in exaflops) than the first TPU generation from 2018, the Cluster Director for managing entire groups of accelerators, the intensified collaboration with Nvidia and the new Vertex AI dashboards.

Google Cloud lets its customers into its Cloud Wide Area Network, makes Workspace smarter and wants to network agents with each other via its own ADK and an exchange protocol called A2A. All of this shows customers that companies are already receiving “real business value” from Google's AI products. The collaboration with customers is sometimes more and sometimes less intensive. For the “Wizard of Oz” project in the (over) 180-degree Las Vegas Sphere movie theater, which had its presentation event, Google brought its cloud teams and DeepMind developers together with special effects experts to bring Dorothy, the Scarecrow, the Tin Man and the Lion into previously non-existent worlds of resolution.

Google Cloud is big – but smaller than the competition

However, Google Cloud Next is more than just an in-house exhibition. It has its exhibition hall with hundreds of Google partners who are working on their cloud and AI solutions. Google Cloud tries to be as neutral as possible, even if everything ultimately has to run on the Group's infrastructure. The range of models running on Vertex AI is growing – Everything that is available as a portable, open-source AI system should also be available on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Meta's Llama 4 is now generally available, as are Flux, Mistral and Qwen2, of course. Google would probably also be happy to host OpenAI models on GCP if they were available.

A political issue this year was once again that Microsoft wants to secure more and more market share in the cloud sector by selling complete packages and only allowing Microsoft 365 systems to be hosted on Azure. Google has been dealing with this issue for years and has now also filed antitrust complaints. “Microsoft's license terms prevent European customers from moving their current Microsoft workloads to competitors' clouds – although there are no technical barriers to doing so.” Alternatively, Microsoft is imposing a price premium of no less than 400 percent, as the company itself admits. It is interesting to see how the internet giant Alphabet is actually becoming the underdog here, playing only third fiddle behind Amazon Web Services and Azure. Microsoft, meanwhile, is happily and directly trying to steal cloud workloads from both AWS and GCP, unless it pushes Exchange on-premise installations from enterprise customers into its Azure cloud program because it can only support them so well. Google's continuously improving Workspace seems like the product of an agile start-up. Well, almost, anyway.

The trend towards Europeanization also affects Google Cloud

What Google Cloud can hardly do, however, is shed the image of an American company. The Alphabet subsidiary can only constantly emphasize how connected and networked it is in the global world, with countless locations and points of presence, local data centers and the toughest encryption that even a Secret Service should not be able to crack (and Google Cloud doesn't know what its customers are storing). It was also emphasized that the company always adheres to local regulations, which may well be different from those in the USA.

Nevertheless, everyone is now talking about digital independence from the United States. A new sovereignty is being called for, however difficult this may be due to the lack of alternatives. The local provider OVHcloud recently declared the US President “Employee of the Month” because he leads to the use of European cloud providers. Significant requests “from DAX companies and the public sector” were not only received in March. The question is, of course, whether this is practical or whether companies like Google Cloud will simply start to internationalize even more and, if necessary, position themselves commercially in such a way that the US government no longer has any leverage. “We are enabling sovereign clouds with partners to comply with international regulations,” said Google Cloud CEO Kurian during his keynote. And Pichai said that the AI opportunity was “as big as you can imagine”. Google Cloud now has 42 regions of its own, including Sweden in Europe, Mexico in America and South Africa in Africa. Most recently, the use of Vertex AI is said to have increased twenty-fold. This also has to do with multimedia: Google presented new video and music generators such as Veo 2 and Lyria.

The author traveled to Google Cloud Next 2025 at the invitation of Google Cloud.

(kbe)