Top 5 highlights from Google Cloud Next 2025
- Marijan Hassan - Tech Journalist
- 5 days ago
- 2 min read
Last week in Las Vegas, Google Cloud Next 2025 made one thing crystal clear. AI isn’t some distant promise. It’s the reality we’re building in real time.
With over 500 customer stories and keynote moments from Sundar Pichai and Thomas Kurian, the event wasn’t just about product updates. It was about showing how quickly AI has moved from buzzword to backbone. Just a year ago, much of this sounded like science fiction. Today, it’s powering drive-thrus, streamlining global marketing campaigns, writing code, and even composing music.
Here are the five biggest announcements from Google Cloud Next 2025
1. Vertex AI now powers multimodal generative media
Google introduced an all-star lineup of generative models under Vertex AI, now covering video, image, speech, and music. The preview of Lyria, a text-to-music model, marks a first for enterprise-grade audio generation. Meanwhile:
Veo 2 now offers advanced cinematic controls with features like inpainting, outpainting, and interpolation.
Imagen 3 delivers top-ranked image generation with smarter editing tools.
Chirp 3 enables custom voice creation from just 10 seconds of audio and improved transcription for multi-speaker recordings.
Enterprises like L’Oreal and Kraft Heinz are already using these tools to collapse creative timelines from weeks to hours, with copyright safeguards like SynthID watermarking baked in.
2. Specialized AI agents are delivering real business ROI
AI agents are no longer experimental. They’re solving real problems — fast:
Wendy’s AI takes 60,000 drive-thru orders daily.
Wayfair uses data agents to enrich product catalogs 5x faster.
Commerzbank slashed call summary work by 66%.
Even Google engineers now rely on coding agents to generate 25% of new code.
With new tools like the Agent Development Kit and Agent2Agent protocol, building a multi-agent ecosystem is easier than ever, and is seeing adoption across sectors from finance to fast food.
3. The AI Hypercomputer pushes performance limits
Google unveiled the AI Hypercomputer, its most powerful AI infrastructure yet. It includes:
Ironwood TPUs: 42.5 exaflops per pod, 10x faster than previous gen.
vLLM on TPUs: GPU-trained PyTorch models can now run efficiently on TPUs.
GKE Inferencing: New autoscaling cuts serving costs by up to 30%.
It’s not just raw power, it’s affordable performance. Google says Gemini 2.0 Flash on this system delivers 24x more intelligence per dollar than GPT-4o.
4. Google Unified Security: AI-powered cyber defense
Security took center stage with the launch of Google Unified Security — a converged solution combining:
Threat intelligence
AI-driven alert triage
Secure enterprise browsing
Mandiant expertise
New agents like the Malware Analysis Agent and Alert Triage Agent take action faster, delivering verdicts and context to defenders in real time.
5. Cloud WAN and global reach reimagine enterprise networks
Google Cloud also opened up its private global network to all customers through Cloud WAN — delivering up to 40% faster performance and lowering costs by 40%. Now spanning 42 regions and connected by 2 million miles of subsea and terrestrial cables, it’s the backbone for AI at Google scale.
Honorable mentions
Gemini 2.5 Pro & Flash: Fast, accurate, and cost-efficient. Now available in Vertex AI.
Workspace Upgrades: "Help Me Analyze" in Sheets and "Docs Audio Overview" in Docs bring AI into daily workflows.
Google Agentspace: A new AI interface that integrates directly into Chrome and helps every employee build and use agents.
