Gemini 1.5 Pro, Google's most capable generative AI model, is now available in public preview on Vertex AI, Google's enterprise-focused AI development platform. The company announced the news during its annual Cloud Next conference, which is taking place in Las Vegas this week. Gemini 1.5 Pro launched in February, joining Google's Gemini family of generative AI models. Undoubtedly its headlining feature is the amount of context that it can process: between 128,000 tokens to up to 1 million token...

It's Google Cloud Next in Las Vegas this week, and that means it's time for a bunch of new instance types and accelerators to hit the Google Cloud Platform. In addition to the new custom Arm-based Axion chips, most of this year's announcements are about AI accelerators, whether built by Google itself or from Nvidia. Only a few weeks ago, Nvidia announced its Blackwell platform. But don't expect Google to offer those machines anytime soon. Support for the high-performance Nvidia HGX B200 for AI a...

Google wants Gemini, its family of generative AI models, to power your app's databases — in a sense. At its annual Cloud Next conference in Last Vegas, Google announced the public preview of Gemini in Databases, a collection of features underpinned by Gemini to — as the company pitched it – "simplify all aspects of the database journey." In less jargony language, Gemini in Databases is a bundle of AI-powered, developer-focused tools for Google Cloud customers who are creating, monitoring and mig...

Data sovereignty and residency laws have become commonplace in recent years. The major clouds, however, were always set up to enable the free movement of data between their various locations, so over the course of the last few years, all of the hyperscalers started looking into how they could offer sovereign clouds that can guarantee that government data, for example, never left a given country. AWS announced its European Sovereign Cloud last October. The Microsoft Azure Cloud for Sovereignty be...