We are racing to shape our AI future through a new Office of AI and national standards. Yet billions flow into foreign-led data centres while we offer little support for local models or sovereign compute. Without stronger action we risk becoming high-quality hosts rather than true leaders.
Meta's 'Iris' chip enters production in September and OpenAI's 'Jalapeño' targets 50% lower inference costs. The great AI chip rush is reshaping the global supply chain and redefining what AI products are viable to build.
Progress Software disabled access to ShareFile accounts using on-premises Storage Zone Controllers due to a credible security threat, while a massive campaign dubbed FortiBleed has compromised roughly half of all internet-facing Fortinet firewalls globally.
At Cloud Next 2025, Google launched Ironwood, its fastest and most energy efficient AI chip, alongside major updates to Gemini, Vertex AI, and Cloud WAN. With AI now powering over 2 billion monthly Workspace assists, Google is leading the way in building a connected AI future.
Google showed off amazing new AI tools at Cloud Next 2025 in Las Vegas that will change how businesses work worldwide. The company now has tech centers in 42 regions around the world, linked by over two million miles of cables on land and under the sea, with more than 200 connection points across 200+ countries. This huge growth shows Google's push to build a strong base for an AI-powered future.
"The chance to improve lives and reimagine things is why Google has been investing in AI and machine learning for more than two decades,"
said Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet, showing the company's big-picture thinking. The star of Google's AI show is Ironwood, their newest AI chip. Pichai proudly shared,
"Compared to our first public TPU, Ironwood is 3,600 times faster. It's the most powerful chip we've ever built and will open doors to the next wave of AI models."
This huge jump in speed, plus being 29 times more energy-efficient, puts Google ahead in building green AI tech. This means businesses can now use much more powerful computing while using less energy.
Meet Ironwood, our most powerful, capable and energy-efficient TPU yet. #GoogleCloudNext pic.twitter.com/VPsuVFZmX2
— Google (@Google) April 11, 2025
Sundar introducing Ironwood. X.
Google's developer community is booming, with over 4 million developers now using Gemini, Google's best AI models. Even more exciting is that Vertex AI use has skyrocketed 20 times in just the past year, as more people use Gemini, Imagen for pictures, and Veo for videos. In Google Workspace, business users get more than two billion AI helps every month, completely changing how work gets done. These numbers show the real-world impact of Google's AI tools in action.
The new Cloud Wide Area Network (Cloud WAN) is another game-changer, giving all businesses access to Google's private global network. This system is over 40% faster while cutting costs by up to 40%, giving businesses better speed for less money. For companies that need to keep data in their own buildings, Google Distributed Cloud now brings Gemini models on-site through team-ups with big names like NVIDIA and Dell, making AI available to everyone no matter their setup.
As announced at Google Cloud Next, NVIDIA is partnering with Google Cloud to bring agentic AI on-prem with support for Gemini models—powered by NVIDIA Blackwell and Confidential Computing for top-tier performance and security. Hear more from CEO Jensen Huang below.
Announced at #GoogleCloudNext: NVIDIA and @GoogleCloud are bringing #agenticAI on-prem with support for Google Gemini models—powered by NVIDIA Blackwell and Confidential Computing for top-tier performance and security. https://t.co/Szjt9BUMzr
— NVIDIA (@nvidia) April 9, 2025
Hear more from our CEO Jensen Huang. pic.twitter.com/NZsPnd2cjB
"Organizations around the world are building with Google Cloud to drive growth and transform industries,"
said Thomas Kurian, Google Cloud CEO, highlighting how these tools help real businesses. As companies move into an AI-powered world, Google Cloud Next 2025 shows that Google is leading the AI revolution, not just joining it. They're creating tools that make cutting-edge AI easy to use for companies of all sizes. Their new Agent2Agent Protocol lets AI tools from different makers talk to each other safely, showing Google's push to build an AI world where everything works together to help businesses succeed.
We are racing to shape our AI future through a new Office of AI and national standards. Yet billions flow into foreign-led data centres while we offer little support for local models or sovereign compute. Without stronger action we risk becoming high-quality hosts rather than true leaders.
SK Hynix has priced the biggest foreign listing in American history at $149 a share. The memory war we have tracked for a fortnight now has a market price. It reads as a verdict on who controls the inference economy.
AWS has increased prices for reserved AI GPU capacity by around 20%, highlighting the growing shortage of high bandwidth memory and advanced chips. As demand outpaces supply, AI development costs are rising, making large scale model training and deployment more expensive.
The memory war exposes AI’s harder truth: power now sits in fabs, wafers, export licences and trusted supply. Apple, Micron, Nvidia, China, South Korea and Japan are no longer fighting over chips alone, but over dependence, pricing and the pace of intelligence itself across global markets, in 2026.
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