Google Cloud sets A5X Vera Rubin launch with clusters of up to 960,000 GPUs

What Google Cloud announced

Google Cloud published a set of infrastructure updates with NVIDIA on 21 October 2026, timed to NVIDIA's GTC Berlin event. The headline item is A5X, a bare-metal GPU instance built on the NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 platform. Google says general availability is coming next month, with more infrastructure for EMEA data residency in new local regions. The post was written by Mark Lohmeyer and Ankur Mehrotra, who run Google Cloud's compute and sovereign cloud units.

Google's Virgo Network is the scale-out fabric behind A5X. Google describes it as a non-blocking network inside and between buildings, using a mesh topology. With it, clusters can grow to 80,000 Rubin GPUs within a single site and up to 960,000 Rubin GPUs across multi-site deployments.

Storage, memory and confidential computing

Managed Lustre will support NVIDIA GPUDirect Storage on A5X, giving a direct RDMA path from the file system into GPU memory without passing through the CPU. A5X will also support KV caching that extends context memory beyond GPU HBM by moving context across storage tiers, which Google says lowers time to first token for long-context inference.

Two products are generally available now. Confidential G4 instances run on NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs with hardware-backed protection. On premises, NVIDIA HGX B300 systems are generally available on Google Distributed Cloud, where Gemini 3.5 Flash can run inside air-gapped environments. Confidential Computing on A4 instances with HGX B200 is available to select customers. WPP's chief technology officer Stephan Pretorius is quoted as an A5X customer. Google also said Gemma, Mistral and NVIDIA Nemotron models are joining its Sovereign Cloud portfolio, with customers keeping full custody of model weights and runtimes.

Why it matters

The 960,000-GPU figure describes training across several sites rather than a single building. NVIDIA's own post names Ineffable Intelligence as the first customer to access A5X. It puts Google Cloud in the same race as Oracle, which made Vera Rubin generally available on OCI six days later. The difference is timing: Google gives a month, not a date, and does not publish A5X prices or launch regions. The supply side of the same buildout was covered in NVIDIA's supply chain announcement earlier that day.

What to watch next

The open points are the A5X general availability date, its first regions in EMEA and elsewhere, and list prices, none of which appear in the post. It is also not stated how many sites a 960,000-GPU deployment would span or when the first one would run. More infrastructure stories are collected under AI Chips & Infrastructure.

Questions people ask

When will Google Cloud A5X be available?

Google says general availability is coming next month, counted from its 21 October 2026 post. It does not give an exact date.

How many GPUs can an A5X cluster use?

Up to 80,000 Rubin GPUs in a single site and up to 960,000 Rubin GPUs across multi-site deployments, using Google's Virgo Network, according to the post.

How much does A5X cost?

Prices are not stated in the announcement.

Sources

1. Google Cloud and NVIDIA expand co-engineering collaboration to scale infrastructure for the agentic era (Google Cloud, 21 Oct 2026)
2. Google Cloud and NVIDIA Announce General Availability of NVIDIA Vera Rubin Infrastructure (NVIDIA, 21 Oct 2026)