Google Cloud Next 2026: Scaling AI agents

(Image credit: Future)

Las Vegas may be known as the city of sin, but in the world of tech it’s also the land of conferences. Taking over the Mandalay Bay resort this week was Google Cloud Next, Alphabet’s chance to show off the latest in its cloud strategy and – naturally – AI tools.

AI agents, in particular, have been a focus this year as Google Cloud looks to meet surging customer demand with infrastructure and software innovations for AI inference.

What story has Google been looking to tell at the event? And what’s the reality behind it?

In this episode, Jane speaks to Rory about some of the key talking points at Google Cloud Next 2026.

Highlights

"I think the big thing that has been very positive from customers is Google Cloud keeps reiterating that it understands that people are in a multi-cloud world, that no one wants to actually go all in and locked in on one cloud provider, and also seemingly recognizes that no one's looking to kind of abandon everything that they already pay for and to go fully in house with Google."

"So in a pod of 9600 of these 8t TPUs, they can deliver 121 exaflops of FP4 compute – I'm stressing that because it's not, you know, we're not talking about 64 bit top500 stuff here, but we are talking about FP4 low resolution data processing – which is ideal, actually, for training workloads. So that's that's significant."

"It feels like DeepMind kind of has a seat at every table. A lot of the announcements that we hear, like in the in the security space, which we didn't have time for, we're being told that they're being developed with DeepMind in the room."

Footnotes

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Rory Bathgate was Features and Multimedia Editor at ITPro until 2026, overseeing all in-depth content and case studies. He also co-hosted 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 on LinkedIn.

Highlights

Footnotes

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