Google Cloud has announced that it will now bring the AI race to your local data center. Many organizations want to get started with AI, but are constrained to their own data centers through compliance rules and can’t use U.S. based hyperscaler infrastructure. With the new offering, they can now also get started with AI. Google Distributed Cloud (GDC) allows you to run an air-gapped AI infrastructure in your own data center.
It has long been possible to run Google infrastructure in your own data center with Google Distributed Cloud (GDC). Now, however, that option has become a lot more attractive to large organizations. In fact, Google has broadened the offering considerably, including the ability to run AI workloads.
Available from second quarter 2024
Beginning this quarter, it should be possible to run AI everywhere. Governments, banks or very high-end technology companies that don’t want to just put their secrets in a cloud, can now start running the entire AI infrastructure on-premises with GDC. Different AI models, such as Gemma, LLama and several others, can then be worked on that infrastructure. Google hasn’t yet made clear which models will and will not be available, so we suspect the choice will be somewhat limited.
Google is working with partners to offer a managed GDC solution. That means large organizations can work with a local Google partner to build a complete AI infrastructure that is also well managed and that organizations can get the most out of. If needed, the infrastructure can operate completely air-gapped from Google.
High-performance technology in GDC
Google is deploying high-performance technology with the revamped GDC offering so that customers can get started with Vertex AI from their own data centers. The infrastructure uses powerful Nvidia GPUs, among other offerings.
In addition, Google is bringing the Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) to GDC. GKE is used by leading AI organizations to develop their models. Also with this, organizations can now start working on their own data center. AlloyDB Omni for Vector Search will also be available in GDC. So that information can be searched and applied quickly. The entire GDC solution is now also ISO27001 and SOC2 certified. In addition, Google is busy getting all known major software vendors to certify the infrastructure so that all known software solutions also work properly on hardware.
Google Cloud is first vendor with AI hardware and software in sovereign cloud
This makes Google the first vendor capable of delivering both high-performance AI infrastructure and software on-premises, made even more attractive through a sovereign cloud model together with partners. On paper, that’s a strong offering for large enterprise organizations.