Google Cloud announces new data residency flexibility for UK firms, accelerator for regional startups

Hayete Gallot, president of Customer Experience at Google Cloud speaking at the Google Cloud Summit London on 9th July 2025. — (Image credit: ITPro/Rory Bathgate)

Google Cloud has announced new targeted support for UK businesses with a 12 week, equity-free accelerator program for seed to series startups focused on AI.

The program, run in collaboration with Tech London Advocates, will provide participating startups with technical and strategic support, access to AI and ML tools, and access to Google Cloud’s global partner network.

This comes in addition to up to £280,000 in cloud credits, announced as part of Google Cloud’s ‘Gemini for UK’ scheme earlier this year.

The cloud giant said that since 2023, over 60% of generative AI startups in the UK are Google Cloud customers.

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At its Google Cloud Summit London 2025 event, the cloud giant also announced new data residency assurances for UK businesses using its Gemini AI offerings. Businesses can now choose to process data with Gemini 2.5 Flash Machine Learning entirely within the UK.

The announcement builds on the firm’s previous commitment to providing UK data residency for Agentspace, its AI agent program, as well as identical support for Gemini 1.5 Flash machine learning.

“We do understand that you have sovereign obligations and we’re designing our solutions so that regardless of your industry you are in control,” said Hayete Gallot, president of Customer Experience at Google Cloud.

Google Cloud already offers Google Cloud Data Boundary, which lets customers control their data residency and where encryption keys are stored, Google Cloud Dedicated, a series of sovereign solutions run by regional partners, and Google Cloud Air Gapped, for running isolated workloads within critical industries.

In a demo at the event, Lyndsay Yerbic, head of Cloud AI, Field Solution Architecture, UK&I at Google Cloud, showed how Agentspace enables users to quickly create custom AI agents.

The option to confine Agentspace processing to UK data centers will help firms with specific residency requirements, particularly those in heavily regulated industries such as financial organizations.

UK AI on show at Google Cloud Summit London

Throughout Google Cloud Summit London 2025, the cloud giant is aiming to showcase how its AI offerings can make tangible differences to UK firms.

In the event’s opening keynote, attendees heard about how Starling Bank is using Google Gemini to power ‘Spending Intelligence’. This new AI tool allows customers to explore their spending habits through natural language or voice inputs, such as how much they spent on transport last month.

“With my CIO hat on, of course, it was most important to me that I was able to provide both myself and our customers with the assurances around where that data would be held, how that data would be used, and to be comfortable that we were able to articulate that clearly to our customers,” explained Harriet Rees, CIO at Starling Bank.

“I can say that, in my particular case, Google was the first cloud that was able to provide me with those assurances and therefore it was a natural choice for us to progress our Al journey with Google.”

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Rory Bathgate is Features and Multimedia Editor at ITPro, overseeing all in-depth content and case studies. He can also be found co-hosting the ITPro Podcast with Jane McCallion, swapping a keyboard for a microphone to discuss the latest learnings with thought leaders from across the tech sector.

In his free time, Rory enjoys photography, video editing, and good science fiction. After graduating from the University of Kent with a BA in English and American Literature, Rory undertook an MA in Eighteenth-Century Studies at King’s College London. He joined ITPro in 2022 as a graduate, following four years in student journalism. You can contact Rory at rory.bathgate@futurenet.com or on LinkedIn.