Last week, the Google Cloud Next ’25 conference took place at the Mandalay Bay, Las Vegas. As a Google Cloud Partner, Ternary was a proud Velocity sponsor of the conference.

Reflecting on Google Cloud Next ’24, I had three clear takeaways:

  1. AI took center stage
  2. Google celebrated 10 years of Kubernetes
  3. FinOps adoption among Google Cloud customers was accelerating

This year, there’s really only one story: Google is all in on AI. 

Read on for my takeaways from Google Cloud Next ’25.

229 announcements: Nearly all focused on AI

Google Cloud made 229 announcements this year, and nearly all centered on AI—from infrastructure and models to developer tools and enterprise applications. The message was consistent across every keynote, breakout session, and demo. In his welcome letter, Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian named the three main features of Google Cloud (each of which is tightly aligned with AI) that are persuading customers to choose it:

  1. AI-Optimized Platform
  2. Open and Multi-Cloud Capabilities
  3. Interoperability

A few notable announcements included:

  • Ironwood TPUs (TPU v5p). Google’s seventh-generation TPUs deliver 3,600 times the performance of the first publicly available TPU, and they’re 29 times more energy-efficient.
  • Gemini 2.5 and Gemini 2.5 Flash. The newest models are faster, more efficient, and tuned for a range of enterprise use cases across text, code, and media.
  • Generative Media in Vertex AI. Video, image, speech, and music generation are now supported, enabling creative teams to dramatically accelerate content production workflows.

I’d also be remiss if I didn’t mention “The Wizard of Oz at Sphere.” I had the opportunity to attend the exclusive partner reveal, ahead of the main conference. Google is using AI to reimagine the 1939 Wizard of Oz film, in collaboration with Sphere Entertainment, Google DeepMind, Magnopus, and several others. There have been quite a few variations of Wizard of Oz movies over the years; it seems that Google is making a statement by selecting this classic, just to prove that they can. Time will tell how the media and entertainment industry will use AI for movies in the future; meanwhile, this project launches an ongoing AI partnership in which Sphere Entertainment uses Google Cloud infrastructure for the massive data processing and rendering support required in immersive theatrical experiences.

FinOps announcements: Advancements and open questions

It was exciting to see how FinOps adoption continues to mature within the Google Cloud community. This year, more attendees came with a solid understanding of FinOps, which led to deeper, more meaningful conversations at Ternary’s booth. Despite AI dominating the conference narrative, we had fewer discussions centered on AI, and more about controlling cloud costs. 

There were several noteworthy FinOps-related updates announced during the event: 

  • FinOps Hub 2.0. The newest version of FinOps Hub includes waste insights and AI-powered cost optimization via Gemini Cloud Assist. This makes it easier for FinOps practitioners to identify and act on cost-saving opportunities.
  • Cloud Hub (Preview). A new offering that targets DevOps and SRE teams, Cloud Hub provides a centralized view of Google Cloud operations data, including cost and resource-utilization insights. It introduces a new “Optimization” tab, which appears to overlap with some FinOps Hub functionality.

Cost Explorer (Private Preview). Cost Explorer provides application-level visibility into cost and utilization metrics, allowing for more granular analysis. However, it resides within App Hub, not FinOps Hub, which raises potential challenges in discoverability and integration.

Google’s announcements reflect significant investment in FinOps capabilities, but they also introduce questions about tooling cohesion. As it stands:

  • Cloud Hub appears to be scoped for developers and operations teams
  • FinOps Hub focuses on finance and FinOps practitioners
  • Cost Explorer is embedded in App Hub, which targets an application-centric view

This fragmentation challenges one of the core principles of FinOps: Teams need to collaborate. Ideally, all teams—finance, engineering, and operations, as well as developers—should work from a unified interface with stakeholder-specific views. As of now, that ideal remains unrealized with Google’s native tools. Ternary is the leading FinOps platform for Google Cloud, and, unlike platforms that claim to be multi-cloud but treat non-AWS clouds as afterthoughts, we offer true multi-cloud feature party. That’s why organizations worldwide are turning to Ternary for enhanced collaboration across teams and clouds.

Teranry teammates at Google Next '25
Ternary teammates at Google Next ’25.

What’s next?

The momentum behind AI at Google Cloud is undeniable. But how Google addresses FinOps collaboration across its growing portfolio of operational tools will be something to watch closely. I’ll be diving deeper into the Cloud Hub, App Hub, and FinOps Hub landscape in a follow-up post. Stay tuned. In the meantime, you can read more about why Ternary is the leading FinOps platform for Google Cloud or request a demo.