Google Cloud has further expanded its partnership with Nvidia via a new lineup of virtual machines aimed at advanced AI applications in the enterprise.
The G4 VMs are powered by Nvidia’s RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs, and, according to Google, constitute a significant advance.
At the same time, Google has made Nvidia Omniverse generally available as a virtual machine image on Google Cloud Marketplace as well as Nvidia Isaac Sim, a reference robotic simulation architecture.
In a blog post, Google Cloud’s Roy Kim and Dai Vu explained: “The G4 VM offers a profound leap in performance, with up to nine times the throughput of G2 instances, enabling a step-change in results for a wide spectrum of workloads, from multimodal AI inference, photorealistic design and visualization, and robotics simulation using applications developed on Nvidia Omniverse.”
Initially, G4 VMs can be configured with one, two, four and eight RTX Pro Blackwell GPU options — totaling 768 GB of GDDR7 memory. Fractional GPU options will be coming soon.
Its design combines fifth-generation tensor cores that deliver a leap in AI performance, and fourth-generation RT cores that enable cinematic-quality graphics and photorealistic simulations, according to Nvidia.
Google Cloud stated that customers will benefit in several areas, including generative AI, where G4’s compute accelerates large language model fine-tuning and inference, enabling real-time applications such as multimodal and text-to-image models.
There are potential efficiency gains, too. Because the G4 allows a single GPU to be split into four isolated instances, each with its own high-bandwidth memory and compute core, multiple smaller distinct workloads can be run concurrently off a single VM.
Plus, it brings flexibility and scaling, with the ability to run AI models from less than 30 billion to more than 100 billion parameters.
Google Cloud’s Kim and Vu also described how the availability of Nvidia Omniverse on Google Cloud Marketplace will benefit customers. “G4 VMs provide the necessary infrastructure to run the demanding real-time rendering and physically accurate simulations required for enterprise digital twins. Together [with Omniverse], they provide a scalable cloud environment to build, deploy, and interact with applications for industrial digital twins or robotics simulation.”
For Nvidia, the expanded partnership establishes an end-to-end platform on Blackwell, with the unified architecture providing what is claimed to be a seamless experience for accelerating workloads within a single cloud ecosystem.