In 2024, Google Cloud is poised to amplify its presence in the hyperscaler market, becoming an even more formidable competitor.

There has been recent news signaling Google Cloud’s progress. Parent company Alphabet Inc. announced earnings in late January that showcased its cloud operation as a bright spot, with revenue growing 26% in the last quarter.

This represented a turnaround from a restated operating loss of $186 million in the previous year, an outcome driven by a tailwind from the company’s investment in artificial intelligence. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai noted in the search giant’s earnings call that the latest results represented enterprise interest in its Gemini offerings as the company pursued an AI-focused agenda in earnest.

TheCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, will be broadcasting live from Google Cloud Next in Las Vegas, April 9-11, with an exclusive look at Google’s leap into generative AI for enterprises. Tune in for news and analysis as theCUBE interviews thought leaders and company executives for insight into how Google’s R&D is reshaping enterprise solutions, with deep dives into new products, key stats and generative AI use cases.

“[Google Cloud] is now close to breaking the $10 billion recurring revenue barrier,” said Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc., in comments for SiliconANGLE. “With Google’s progress in generative AI, epitomized by the release of its new Gemini models, Sundar Pichai and Google head into 2024 with a much stronger AI story than their cloud rivals.” (* Disclosure below.)

Check out what’s in store for theCUBE’s coverage of the Google Cloud Next ’24:

Building on Google Cloud announcements

What will make April’s gathering of keen interest is how Google plans to build on the portfolio of AI products it introduced in the second half of last year. The company laid the groundwork for its fall launches during Google Cloud Next in August when the messaging was focused on the ability of its architecture, encompassing compute, storage and applications solutions layers, to integrate AI across the stack.

This set the stage for the unveiling of Gemini, Google’s generative AI model, in December. It is designed to run from cloud and on-premises data centers, as well as on mobile devices. On the same day, Google Cloud also announced its latest tensor processing unit, v5p, a flexible AI accelerator that trained Gemini and a new AI Hypercomputer.

The AI Hypercomputer architecture employs an integrated system of hardware, software and machine learning frameworks. As Google flexes its engineering chops in the AI arena, it is offering a portfolio of solutions for enterprise and consumer applications.

“From Google’s perspective, we’ve been an AI-first company for a long time,” June Yang, vice president of cloud AI and industry solutions for Google Cloud, said in an interview with SiliconANGLE. “If you think about our products and so forth, whether it’s on the consumer side or the industry [and] enterprise side, pretty much all our products have AI built in.”

Kubernetes enhancements for AI

Another element of the AI narrative expected to be prominent at Google Next is Kubernetes. The container orchestration tool will play a central role in AI deployments. At KubeCon NA in November, Tim Hockin, distinguished software engineer at Google Cloud, noted that the next trillion hours of Kubernetes usage was likely to be powered by AI and machine learning.

This expected growth has influenced Google’s strategy for enhancing Kubernetes over the past several months. In November, GKE Enterprise, Google’s managed Kubernetes service for large organizations, was made generally available two months after it was previewed at Google Next.

In addition, GKE has played a key role in the company’s partnerships with Hugging Face Inc. and OpenAI competitor Anthropic Inc. Hugging Face now facilitates developer access to GKE to run downloaded AI workloads. Anthropic has been using Google’s chips in concert with GKE to train and deploy models.

“GKE allows us to run and optimize our GPU and TPU infrastructure at scale, while Vertex AI will enable us to distribute our models to customers via the Vertex AI Model Garden,” said Anthropic co-founder Tom Brown in a recent statement. “Google’s next-generation AI infrastructure will bring price-performance benefits for our workloads as we continue to build the next wave of AI.”

Attracting developers with new tools

Of interest at the upcoming Google Cloud Next event will be how the company plans to cultivate the engineering community as AI becomes a top priority for developers. In December, Google Cloud announced Duet AI for Developers, a coding assistant for troubleshooting and best practices. The new AI-powered tool is available across multiple integrated development environments.

Also announced that month was developer access to Gemini Pro through Google AI Studio, a web-based tool where developers can create prompts for testing and leveraging the generative AI Gemini model. The offering provides a measure of customization where developers can tune and customize models using company data and shape them to reflect proper brand and tone.

Google’s approach reflects a belief that rising interest in AI will not only create new opportunities for the cloud unit, but it will also generate interest among a younger group of developers on the way up.

“In our view, Google is making inroads with developers,” said Dave Vellante, chief analyst for theCUBE Research. “The broader tech landscape’s shifting generational perceptions, with younger developers leaning toward Google, could have lasting ramifications on market dominance in the coming years. By focusing on the developer experience, optimizing solutions and expanding its ecosystem, Google is setting the pace in a new phase of the cloud market where rapid innovation based on AI is paramount.”

TheCUBE event livestream

Don’t miss theCUBE’s coverage of Google Cloud Next on 4-9 to 4-11. Plus, you can watch theCUBE’s event coverage on-demand after the live event.

How to watch theCUBE interviews

We offer various ways to watch theCUBE’s coverage of Google Cloud Next, including theCUBE’s dedicated website and YouTube channel. You can also get all the coverage from this year’s events on SiliconANGLE.

TheCUBE Insights podcast

SiliconANGLE has podcasts available of archived interview sessions, available on iTunes, Stitcher and Spotify, which you can enjoy while on the go.

SiliconANGLE also has analyst deep dives in our Breaking Analysis podcast, available on iTunes, Stitcher and Spotify.

Guests

During Google Cloud Next, theCUBE Research analysts will talk with industry executives, innovators, technologists, investors and thought leaders about Google’s progress with generative AI tools for enterprises. Stay tuned for our complete guest list.

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Google Cloud Next event. No sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Image: SiliconANGLE