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We are excited to share that Google Cloud was named a Leader and received the highest score in the ‘current offering’ category in the Forrester Wave™: Public Cloud Platforms, Q3 2026 report, which examines the 10 most significant public cloud providers across 30 comprehensive criteria, Google also received the highest possible score in 23 out of 30 evaluation criteria, including, but not limited to vision, innovation, AI development services, database services, analytics services, containers and kubernetes services, modernization services, and security services. We believe Forrester’s recognition confirms our belief that to lead in the agentic era, you need a complete, integrated platform that’s engineered from the ground up, from silicon to systems to models.

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Access the complimentary report: The Forrester Wave™: Public Cloud Platforms, Q3 2026.

Build on co-designed infrastructure proven in global enterprises

For over a decade, our infrastructure engineers, application developers, and AI researchers worked side by side to co-design infrastructure to power Gemini, Search, YouTube, Maps, and Gmail. We couldn’t simply buy the platform and infrastructure we needed; we had to invent it. This led to the creation of everything from TPUs, the Transformer architecture, Kubernetes, Axion, and now Gemini.

In the agentic era, you need an integrated AI stack, where compute, orchestration software, modernization tools, and global networks operate together to give you more value from your investments — even if you’re not working at the frontiers of AI research. At Google Cloud, we’ve worked tirelessly to bring these breakthrough innovations to leading enterprises, startups, and frontier labs to help them achieve new levels of scale and efficiency, and we believe Forrester’s evaluation validates that strategy: 

“Google Cloud’s vision is to enable the ‘agentic enterprise,’ and AI already permeates its platform, positioning the company to push further up the tech stack toward business users who increasingly shape AI adoption in the enterprise. Google Cloud is a good fit for enterprises seeking rapid technology innovation and a broad AI-enabled cloud platform.” – The Forrester Wave™: Public Cloud Platforms, Q3 2026 report

Run agents quickly on a secure, flexible platform

Most traditional infrastructure can’t keep pace with agents, and enterprises need a scalable alternative. But you don’t want a new, greenfield platform just for AI agents. Kubernetes is the proven industry standard for modern enterprise applications — from microservices and transactional databases to real-time LLM inference. We are evolving Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and our operations tooling so organizations can scale autonomous agents alongside traditional workloads on a single, proven platform.

Forrester gave Google Cloud the highest scores possible in Container and Kubernetes services, Serverless/FaaS services, and Operations management services, noting:

“Operators will find strong offerings in operations management as well as containers and Kubernetes services. Our evaluation did not identify significant capability gaps.”

Over the past three months, we’ve enhanced our infrastructure portfolio to help teams scale agentic workloads with enterprise predictability. Recent updates let you:

  • Safely execute untrusted agent code alongside traditional workloads with default-deny security using GKE Agent Sandbox (GA) and Cloud Run Sandboxes (preview), which provision lightweight, gVisor-isolated boundaries for your agent in under a second (and up to 300 sandboxes/sec per cluster).

  • Eliminate up to 90% of idle compute costs by serializing your container RAM state directly to Google Cloud Storage with GKE Pod Snapshots, allowing you to suspend idle agent sessions in ~100ms and resume them in ~280ms.

  • Cut time-to-first-token (TTFT) up to 70% and double cache-hit rates with predictive routing in GKE Inference Gateway, which uses a continuously trained ML model to make routing decisions based on real-time traffic data.

Ground your agents with real-time enterprise data

Agents are only as effective as the context that grounds them. Traditional distributed data topologies separate operational databases from analytical systems through fragmented, multi-hop pipelines. In the agentic era, this divide introduces multi-hop latency, stale context, and governance friction.

Our Agentic Data Cloud evolves the enterprise data platform from a static repository into a dynamic reasoning engine. It unifies transaction processing and analytical intelligence into an active system of action, providing the real-time context and deterministic responsiveness that autonomous workflows require. Google received 5/5 scores across the Database services, Analytics services, Data integration services, and Data Governance services criteria:

“Google Cloud’s traditional strength in database services and analytics drives strong performance, including multicloud and hybrid capabilities, along with an Agentic Data Cloud that bridges analytics and transactional systems.”

Over the past three months, we’ve introduced key capabilities to the Agentic Data Cloud to help customers unify their data estates:

  • Enable agents to query live financial and supply chain records without costly data movement using SAP BDC Connect for BigQuery (GA), which provides bi-directional, zero-copy data sharing between your SAP systems and BigQuery.

  • Map and infer business meaning across your entire data estate with Knowledge Catalog. You can now aggregate native context across your Google and partner data platforms, semantic models, and third-party catalogs, unifying them into a single, governed source of truth.

  • Access live data from Iceberg and BigQuery from the PostgreSQL data plane with Lakehouse federation. Perform live joins between AlloyDB’s transactional data and historical insights in BigQuery or Iceberg without any data movement. You can also replicate data continuously to BigQuery and, importantly, to Iceberg tables directly from AlloyDB with Datastream.

The benchmark is set: Build what’s next on Google Cloud

We are honored that Forrester has named Google Cloud a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Public Cloud Platforms, Q3 2026. We believe this recognition validates decades of foundational research, disciplined full-stack co-design, and our commitment to building an open, reliable cloud.

The era of fragmented infrastructure has come to an end. Whether your organization is an AI research lab scaling models across one million accelerator chips, a global financial exchange settling trillions in clearing systems, or an enterprise empowering millions of users with autonomous workflows, Google Cloud delivers the performance, scale, security, and data foundation to build what’s next.

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