Google Cloud A5X with NVIDIA Vera Rubin Infrastructure Now Available

TL;DR: Google Cloud and NVIDIA announced general availability of A5X instances powered by NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 systems, launching next month with planned expansion to Europe. The platform integrates NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72, ConnectX-9 SuperNICs, and Google Cloud's fourth-generation liquid-cooling technology for demanding agentic inference and reinforcement learning workloads at scale.

What's New

Google Cloud and NVIDIA have announced the general availability of A5X instances accelerated by NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 systems, providing an integrated platform for training, inference and large-scale reinforcement learning to cloud customers.

The A5X instances combine NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72, NVIDIA ConnectX-9 SuperNICs, Google Cloud Virgo Network and Google Cloud's fourth-generation advanced liquid-cooling technology. This infrastructure is designed for demanding agentic inference and reinforcement learning workloads at scale.

Google Cloud plans to scale its Vera Rubin-based infrastructure to as many as 960,000 Rubin GPUs across multiple sites. The platform brings Vera Rubin into Google Cloud's AI Hypercomputer as an integrated system, combining compute, networking and storage to support experience-driven learning at scale.

Ineffable Intelligence, a London-based technology company founded by AlphaGo creator David Silver, was the first customer to access A5X. The company is using the platform to advance large-scale reinforcement learning and develop "superlearner" systems that learn continuously from experience. David Silver explained: "We're building superlearners that continually improve through their own experience. That demands both substantial compute and a tight connection between generating experience and training on it, so each improvement in the agent can quickly shape its next experience."

WPP, a London-based marketing and communications company, has also demonstrated its creative agent reference architecture on NVIDIA Vera Rubin-based A5X instances using NVIDIA Nemotron models and NVIDIA OpenShell. The agents convert conversational requests into multistep creative workflows such as video generation, upscaling and restyling. In WPP's initial tests, workloads that typically required a multi-node cluster ran on a single A5X instance.

Pricing and Availability

General availability of the A5X instances is coming next month, with planned expansion of availability to Europe. Specific pricing details were not disclosed in the announcement.

Google Cloud will be among the first cloud providers to offer NVIDIA Confidential Computing at rack scale on bare metal instances such as A4X Max instances powered by NVIDIA GB300 NVL72. Additionally, Google Cloud is making Confidential Computing generally available on G4 VMs powered by NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs.

How to Try It

Organizations interested in accessing A5X instances can contact Google Cloud directly. The platform is positioned for enterprises working on large-scale reinforcement learning, agentic AI systems, and demanding AI inference workloads.

Customers including Vertebrae, Polaris Cloud and Confidential Core AI are already using Confidential G4 for conversational privacy, verifiable agent execution and policy-governed enterprise intelligence.

Who It's For

The A5X instances are designed for organizations deploying agentic systems that need to protect proprietary models and sensitive data, even when running on infrastructure they don't own. The platform is particularly suited for:

• Companies building reinforcement learning systems that require continuous cycles of generating experience, evaluating outcomes and updating models
• Enterprises deploying creative AI agents and multi-step workflows
• Organizations requiring confidential computing capabilities for AI workloads
• Companies needing to scale AI operations while optimizing energy efficiency

Google Cloud and NVIDIA are exploring NVIDIA DSX MaxLPS capabilities for Vera Rubin-based infrastructure to help optimize performance per watt and expand capacity within available data-center power budgets.

Alternatives

Organizations looking for cloud-based AI infrastructure alternatives can consider other major cloud providers' GPU offerings, though specific competing products were not mentioned in the announcement. The announcement positions A5X instances as particularly differentiated for rack-scale confidential computing and integrated reinforcement learning workflows.