Google Cloud Strengthens UK Commitment with AI Innovations

Google Cloud has announced a suite of AI products and initiatives for the United Kingdom at an event held at Google DeepMind’s London headquarters.

The ‘Gemini for the United Kingdom’ event featured presentations from Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian and Google DeepMind CEO Sir Demis Hassabis, alongside BT Group Chief Executive Allison Kirkby and WPP CEO Mark Read CBE.

The announcements come as Google prepares to open a new £1 billion data centre in the UK this year.

“We already have a cloud region here and we’re expanding our footprint with a new large-scale data centre,” said Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud. “We host these solutions and models here in the UK, enabling data residency to meet regulatory requirements.”

Chirp 3 and Agentspace expand Google Cloud AI portfolio

At the event, Google Cloud revealed that Chirp 3 – the latest iteration of its audio generation model – will join the Vertex AI platform. The service will be available next week with HD Voices capability in 31 languages, providing 248 voices across eight speaker options.

The model aims to capture human speech patterns for applications including voice annotation, meeting transcription, audiobooks and customer call analysis.

“Our general vision for AI has been to offer a broad range of models – we’re going to focus on Gemini – but we also offer Imagen, Veo and Chirp, along with scientific models,” said Kurian.

The company also announced expanded UK data residency options for its Google Agentspace product, scheduled for availability in the second quarter of 2025. This follows a previous commitment allowing UK organisations, including public sector entities, to store data and conduct machine learning processing using the Gemini 1.5 Flash language model entirely within the UK.

“It’s an important element to give companies confidence that they can use our systems, that their data will be private to their own use, and that they have full control to keep the data where they need it,” Kurian explained. “For example, for a hospital, like Moorfields Eye Hospital, which is using our models for diagnostics, data residency within the UK is an important element we offer alongside our AI capabilities.”

Agentspace combines Gemini reasoning capabilities with search functionality and enterprise data tools. It includes NotebookLM Enterprise for information synthesis and allows for the creation of custom AI agents for research, content creation, and process automation.

“We’ve introduced a new product called Agentspace. It combines search, chat and agents so that you can use it as a software-as-a-service platform,” Kurian added.

Google DeepMind announces significant Gemini advancements

The event also highlighted recent technological breakthroughs from Google DeepMind, which has been particularly active in developing AI capabilities.

“It’s been quite a big week for us,” said Sir Demis Hassabis, CEO and Co-founder of Google DeepMind. “Last week, we announced new breakthrough technologies building on Gemini. We introduced Gemini 2.0 Flash, the first model featuring native image generation integrated with text.”

The company has expanded Gemini’s capabilities across multiple domains. “We’ve improved our inference models for better planning and multimodal understanding. Gemini can now process YouTube videos, summarising key points or moments,” Hassabis explained.

“We’re also excited about Gemini Robotics, our advanced visual language-action model for robots, enabling them to interact with their environment effectively.” 

One year after launching the first iteration of its Gemma open source model, the company also recently announced the launch of Gemma 3, a collection of lightweight, state-of-the-art open models built from the same research and technology that powers its Gemini 2.0 models.

“We also announced Gemma 3, the world’s most capable open-source model operating on single GPUs or TPUs. A whole host of advances happened just last week – one week is a long time in AI!”

UK skills training programme expands across education sectors

Google Cloud has also announced it has expanded its AI skills initiatives in the UK, offering training and certification programmes without charge for developers, students, professionals and higher education institutions.

The company reports it has trained over one million people across 500 UK locations in the past decade, including students, educators, small business owners and developers.

“I’m really proud of our UK roots, having founded Google DeepMind in London, in large part due to the amazing talent and academic institutions based here,” said Hassabis.

The expanded training offerings include 35 free Skills Boost credits per month for developers focused on Gen AI applications, cohort-based Google Career Launchpad programmes for higher education institutions and AI courses on YouTube covering multiple skill levels.

Google Cloud has also introduced three standalone courses on its Skills Boost platform addressing AI security, Gemini in BigQuery, and building generative AI agents with Vertex AI and Flutter.

With over 60% of UK Gen AI startups already using Google Cloud services, the company also announced a support package of up to £280,000 in cloud credits for UK-based AI startups.

The package includes technical resources, training and access to Google Cloud's network of experts, investors, partners and other startups, and follows the recent launch of the 2025 Google for Startups Accelerator programme focusing on AI-first UK companies.

Industry transformation requires integration expertise

Google Cloud’s approach extends beyond providing technology to helping organisations integrate AI into their core operations.

“We recognise that AI is not easy for all organisations to adopt. They have to learn how to integrate it into their core business functions,” said Kurian. “If you’re an insurance company, you might use AI to transform underwriting, like we do with Hiscox. If you’re a bank, you might use AI for product origination or fraud surveillance, as we do with HSBC.”

For Google, the UK represents a substantial investment and strategic market. “As the engine room for Google, through our Gemini models we continue to contribute to the thriving UK tech sector by helping developers and businesses across the UK and worldwide drive breakthroughs with the help of AI,” said Hassabis.

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