• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer, April 10, 2024

Axion is Google's first custom Arm-based CPU for data centers. The company promises it will provide significant improvements for performance compared with today's cloud tools. The idea is to offer virtual machines powered by these processors to customers in the coming months.

Thomas Kurian, CEO at Google Cloud, earlier this year announced plans to invest $37 billion in the division in areas such as cybersecurity, collaboration, and generative AI (GAI).

Google is using Axion internally, running services such as Google Earth Engine, and the YouTube Ads platform on Google Cloud. It also runs Bigtable, a NoSQL database service that allows for wide tables with thousands of columns, also known as a distributed multi-dimensional map or a wide-column database.

Among others, it runs BigQuery, a managed enterprise data warehouse, and Blogstore a service that allows applications to serve data objects that are limited by the amount of data that can be uploaded or downloaded over one HTTP connection.

Google plans to elaborate on its virtual machines powered by Axion processors in the next few months, and will become available to Google Cloud customers later this year.

Other announcements made today include a major collaboration between WPP Group and Google. WPP will use Gemini AI to help produce ads, including ad narration, voiceover script generation, and product image creation.

“This collaboration marks a pivotal moment in marketing innovation," Stephan Pretorius, WPP CTO, wrote in a blog post. "Our integration of Gemini 1.5 Pro into WPP Open has significantly accelerated our gen AI innovation and enables us to do things we could only dream of a few months ago.”

WPP works with some of the largest brands such as Coca-Cola Company, L’Oréal, and Nestlé.

Google Cloud’s advanced GAI tools will integrate with WPP’s marketing and advertising data. The integration will enable WPP clients to create brand and product-specific content. It also will provided WPP clients with deeper insights into their target audiences, predictions, and optimize campaigns.

Google also said it is integrated search into Vertex, its AI offering for businesses, to give users access to more recent information and citations indicating the sources for key data. It will let business to "ground" results from AI queries using their own data.

Vertex AI Agent Builder streamlines the process of grounding GAI outputs in enterprise data. That effort, however, remains in its earlier stage. Google announced new connections to Workday and Salesforce data, with plans to add more options over time.