Google named a Leader in The Forrester Wave: AI Infrastructure Solutions, Q1 2024

Today, we are excited to announce that Forrester Research has recognized Google as a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: AI Infrastructure Solutions, Q1 2024. We believe this is a testament to our vision and strong track record of delivering continuous innovation and leading AI infrastructure products for our customers.

Google received the highest scores of any vendor evaluated in both the Current Offering and Strategy categories in this report.

Download the report: The Forrester Wave™: AI Infrastructure Solutions, Q1 2024

In this report, Forrester evaluated 12 vendors against pre-defined criteria, assessing them on their current offerings and strategy. In addition to being named a Leader, Google received the highest possible score in 17 different evaluation criteria, including, but not limited to, Architecture, Ecosystem, Vision, Innovation, and Roadmap.

The rise of generative AI marks the start of a new AI transformation era. The larger, more complex models powering this transformation feature hundreds of billions (or even trillions) of parameters, require extensive training periods, sometimes spanning months — even on the most specialized systems. 

As a result, the traditional ways of designing and building computing infrastructure are no longer adequate for the exponentially growing demands of workloads like generative AI and LLMs. Organizations need to re-architect their infrastructure by investing in a proven and fully integrated stack of AI infrastructure to capitalize on the opportunities of generative AI.

Google Cloud's AI infrastructure excels in this area, with a decade of cutting-edge AI advancement built into its foundation. This integrated solution of optimized hardware, software, frameworks, and flexible consumption models allows businesses to rapidly and cost-effectively scale their AI workloads from start to finish, across training, fine tuning, and inferencing/serving use-cases.

We believe Forrester’s recognition of Google Cloud as a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: AI Infrastructure Solutions, Q1 2024, underscores our decades-long investment in AI research and development. Our investments have propelled Google Cloud beyond the fundamentals of computation, networking, and storage. We provide comprehensive software, frameworks, optimized AI workload orchestration, and platforms explicitly tailored for training and serving a broad range of AI models.

“Doing AI efficiently at Google-scale is a feat that few other companies in the world are capable of. Google brings that experience and infrastructure to Google Cloud AI Infrastructure. Google’s early and ongoing investments in AI for its other businesses drives its vision of “where the puck is going to be” for enterprise AI. Google’s superior roadmap and innovation is to make Google-scale accessible to all customers whether a bright tiny startup or large global enterprises whilst at the same time abstracting the complexity with easy-to-use tools.” - The Forrester Wave™: AI Infrastructure Solutions, Q1 2024

This decades-long dedication to building a comprehensive, AI-optimized stack has culminated in AI Hypercomputer – a supercomputing architecture that combines a suite of technologies optimized for modern AI workloads. AI Hypercomputer is composed of: 

• Performance-optimized hardware: Compute, storage, and networking built over an ultrascale data center infrastructure, leveraging a high-density footprint, liquid cooling, and our Jupiter data center network. All of this is predicated on technologies that are built with performance and efficiency at their core; leveraging clean energy and a deep commitment to sustainability, to help us move toward a carbon-free future.
• Open software: AI Hypercomputer enables developers to access our performance-optimized hardware through the use of open software like Cloud TPU Multislice Training and Multihost Inference to tune, manage, and dynamically orchestrate AI training and inference workloads on top of performance-optimized AI hardware. It is also equipped with extensive support for popular ML frameworks such as JAX, TensorFlow, and PyTorch are available right out of the box. For customers looking for flexibility to architect their own AI platform, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) streamlines training and serving for the latest foundation models, with built-in support for autoscaling, workload orchestration, and automatic upgrades.
• Flexible consumption: AI Hypercomputer offers a wide range of flexible and dynamic consumption choices. In addition to traditional options, such as committed use discounts (CUD), on-demand pricing, and spot pricing, it also provides consumption models tailored for AI workloads via Dynamic Workload Scheduler, which provides consumption options for utilizing computing power quickly, as well as for higher predictability on job start times.

Finally, for customers seeking the simplest way to train, use, and deploy AI models, Vertex AI provides an end-to-end platform for building production AI applications. Whether training a model from scratch, leveraging AutoML, or using one of the 130+ available foundation models from Google, third-party partners, and the open-source community, Vertex AI makes it simple to use Google Cloud’s AI Infrastructure to power your enterprise grade AI applications. No matter the level of technical sophistication, customers can find the right tooling to use, train, and deploy a model with minimal configuration and fully managed MLOps and governance, allowing you to focus on your model's application rather than the management overhead of underlying infrastructure.

“Google offers the whole package for AI workloads. AI continues to be a core capability of Google’s many consumer and business services such as internet search and advertising. So, to say Google has a head-start is an understatement.“ - The Forrester Wave™: AI Infrastructure Solutions, Q1 2024

We believe Google Cloud’s placement as a Leader in this report also highlights our proven expertise in AI: Google services such as Google Search, Street View, Google Photos, and Google Translate, as well as leading generative AI companies such as Anthropic, Assembly AI, Lightricks, and Character.AI — all use Google Cloud’s AI infrastructure to power their business. In fact, more than 70 percent of generative AI unicorns are Google Cloud customers. 

“Internet-native customers appreciate the efficient elastic scale to run spikey workloads and control costs. Reference customers appreciate the tight integration with Google’s AI platform, Vertex AI, to build AI solutions using both custom models and LLMs.” -The Forrester Wave™: AI Infrastructure Solutions, Q1 2024

But it’s not just AI unicorns who are benefitting — many enterprises also look to Google Cloud to extend Google’s AI capabilities and embed them into key parts of their cloud computing. Companies like Wendy’s, Canva, Uber, Deutsche Bank, and more are using our generative AI platform to create amazing content, synthesize and organize information, automate business processes, and build engaging customer experiences.

We are honored to be a Leader in The Forrester Wave: AI Infrastructure Solutions, Q1 2024 report. We have channeled decades worth of AI R&D expertise when designing our ultra-scale infrastructure to the benefit of our customers. We are committed to ongoing research and innovation in the field of AI. 

The full report can be accessed here: The Forrester Wave™: AI Infrastructure Solutions, Q1 2024.