At its annual Cloud Next ‘26 conference, Google Cloud officially declared the beginning of the “Agentic Era,” unveiling a massive suite of hardware and software designed to transform businesses into “Agentic Enterprises.” Leading the charge are the Google’s eighth-generation Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) and a comprehensive new platform for building autonomous AI agents. The Cloud team presented a vision where AI doesn’t just answer questions but proactively completes complex business processes.Google CEO Sundar Pichai congratulated the Cloud team that worked on the innovation in the last year. He posted on X (formerly Twitter):Google Cloud has incredible momentum: our models now process 16B+ tokens /min via direct API use by our customers (up from 10B last quarter).This week at Cloud Next we’re sharing an extraordinary range of new partnerships and innovations, including our new Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, the new mission control to build, scale, govern, and optimize agents. We’re also launching our 8th-gen TPUs to take on the most demanding agentic workloads.Congratulations to our @GoogleCloud team, and a huge thanks to our partners who are building the future with us.
Custom silicon: The TPU 8-Series
At the heart of ‘Agentic AI revolution’ is Google’s new AI Hypercomputer infrastructure. Google introduced two specialised 8th-generation chips to meet the massive compute demands of autonomous agents:TPU 8t (Training): Designed for high-speed model building, this chip can be scaled up to 9,600 TPUs in a single superpod. It offers three times the processing power of the previous generation and twice the performance per watt.TPU 8i (Inference): Optimised for running AI agents in real-time, the 8i delivers 80% better performance per dollar. It is engineered for “near-zero latency,” ensuring that AI agents can react and execute tasks instantly.Google also announced it will be among the first to offer Nvidia’s Vera Rubin NVL72 systems, giving customers the flexibility to choose the best architecture for their specific needs.
The Gemini Enterprise Agent platform
Beyond hardware, Google launched the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform. This is a “one-stop shop” for technical teams to build, scale and govern AI agents. The platform includes an “Agent Studio” for low-code development and “Agent-to-Agent Orchestration,” which allows different AI agents to delegate tasks to one another seamlessly.Google emphasised that the Agentic Era requires a new approach to data and security. The new Agentic Data Cloud moves away from reactive archives to “systems of action,” allowing agents to reason across a company’s entire data estate in real-time.To protect these autonomous systems, Google introduced Agentic Defense. This cybersecurity platform combines Google’s threat intelligence with Wiz’s security platform to proactively detect “reasoning drift” or suspicious agent behavior before it impacts the business.
