At its annual Cloud Next ’26 conference, Google Cloud officially announced the beginning of the “agentic era”, unveiling a vast suite of hardware and software designed to transform businesses into “agentic enterprises”.leading the charge GoogleEighth generation Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) and a comprehensive new platform for building autonomous AI agents. The Cloud team presented a vision where AI not only answers questions but actively completes complex business processes.Google CEO Sundar Pichai congratulated the cloud team working on innovation last year. He posted on X (formerly Twitter):Google Cloud has incredible speed: our models now process 16B+ tokens/minute through direct API usage by our customers (up from 10B last quarter).This week at Cloud Next we’re sharing an extraordinary range of new collaborations and innovations, including our new partnership Gemini Enterprise Agent PlatformNew mission control to create, scale, govern, and customize agents. We’re also launching our 8th Generation TPU to handle the most demanding agentic workloads.Congratulations to our @GoogleCloud team, and a big thank you to our partners who are building the future with us.

Custom Silicone: The TPU 8-Series

At the heart of the ‘agentic AI revolution’ is Google’s new AI hypercomputer infrastructure. Google introduced two special 8th generation chips to meet the massive compute demands of autonomous agents:TPU 8T (Training): Designed for high-speed model creation, this chip can be expanded to 9,600 TPU in a SuperPod. It offers three times more processing power and twice the performance per watt than the previous generation.TPU 8i (estimate): Optimized for running AI agents in real-time, 8i delivers up to 80% better performance per dollar. It is engineered to have “near-zero latency,” ensuring that AI agents can respond instantly and execute tasks.Google also announced that it will be one of the first systems to offer Nvidia’s Vera Rubin NVL72 system, giving customers the flexibility to choose the best architecture for their specific needs.

Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform

Beyond hardware, Google launched the Gemini enterprise agent platform. It is a “one-stop shop” for technical teams to build, scale, and operate 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 each other.Google emphasized that a new approach to data and security is needed in the agent age. The new agentic data cloud moves from reactive archives to “functioning systems,” allowing agents to consider 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 Viz’s security platform to proactively detect “logical drift” or suspicious agent behavior before it impacts the business.