Google Cloud Platform is the public cloud division of Google, third in global market share behind AWS and Azure but ahead in several categories — particularly data analytics (BigQuery), Kubernetes (GKE, as the original creator of the project), and AI infrastructure (TPUs, Vertex AI, native Gemini integration).
GCP has been a primary beneficiary of the AI wave. Anthropic's April 2026 compute deal for 3.5 gigawatts of Google AI processors brought a flagship AI customer onto GCP's infrastructure, and the availability of TPUs (which NVIDIA-constrained competitors cannot match at scale) gives GCP a structural advantage for serious frontier AI training workloads.
For enterprise buyers, GCP remains an underdog in general-purpose workloads but a strong contender for data-platform-heavy applications and any AI workload that can tolerate the Google- specific software ecosystem.