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AI Hypercomputer Update: vLLM on TPUs and Tooling Advances

🔧 Google Cloud’s Q3 AI Hypercomputer update highlights inference improvements and expanded tooling to accelerate model serving and diagnostics. The release integrates vLLM with Cloud TPUs via the new tpu-inference plugin, unifying JAX and PyTorch runtimes and boosting TPU inference for models such as Gemma, Llama, and Qwen. Additional launches include improved XProf profiling and Cloud Diagnostics XProf, an AI inference recipe for NVIDIA Dynamo, NVIDIA NeMo RL recipes, and GA of the GKE Inference Gateway and Quickstart to help optimize latency and cost.

Google Named Leader in 2025 IDC MarketScape for GenAI

🏆 Google Cloud announced it was named a Leader in the 2025 IDC MarketScape for Worldwide GenAI Life-Cycle Foundation Model Software, spotlighting the Gemini model family and the Vertex AI platform. The post highlights Gemini 2.5’s expanded “thinking” capabilities and new cost controls such as thinking budgets and thought summaries for improved auditability. It also underscores native multimodality, creative variants like Nano Banana, developer tooling including the Gemini CLI, and enterprise features for customization, grounding, security, and governance.

G4 VMs: High-performance P2P Fabric for Multi‑GPU Workloads

🚀 Google Cloud's newly GA G4 VMs combine NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell GPUs with a custom, software-defined PCIe fabric to enable high-performance peer-to-peer (P2P) GPU communication. The platform accelerates collective operations like All-Gather and All-Reduce without code changes, delivering up to 2.2x faster collectives. For tensor-parallel inference, customers can see up to 168% higher throughput and up to 41% lower inter-token latency. G4 integrates with GKE Inference Gateway for horizontal scaling and production deployments.

Oklahoma Transforms Data Access, Strengthens Employer Trust

🔍 The Oklahoma Employment Security Commission modernized its 40‑year mainframe data architecture with a cloud-first data platform built on BigQuery and analytics delivered via Looker. Partnering with Google Public Sector and Phase2, OESC reorganized opaque, mainframe-mimicking schemas into a performant, intuitive model and enabled point-in-time snapshots previously impossible. Critical reporting moved from months to hours, stakeholders gained self-service access, and the agency unlocked employer insights that supported tax analysis, improved auditability, and accelerated fraud detection.

New Russian COLDRIVER Malware: NOROBOT and ROBOTs Variants

🤖 Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) attributes a rapid malware retooling to the Russia-aligned COLDRIVER group after the May 2025 LOSTKEYS disclosure. The campaign uses a COLDCOPY “ClickFix” lure that coerces users to run a malicious DLL via rundll32; the DLL family is tracked as NOROBOT. Early NOROBOT variants fetched a noisy Python backdoor named YESROBOT, which was quickly replaced by a lighter, extensible PowerShell backdoor called MAYBEROBOT. GTIG published IOCs, YARA rules, and protective measures including Safe Browsing coverage and targeted alerts.

Axion C4A and N4 VMs Now GA for Cloud SQL Enterprise

🚀 Google has made Axion-powered C4A and Intel-based N4 virtual machines generally available for Cloud SQL Enterprise Plus and Enterprise editions, promising substantial gains in throughput and price-performance. Hyperdisk Balanced storage is supported on both families to boost I/O, increase throughput, and allow independent configuration of capacity, throughput, and IOPS. Customer tests report lower costs, reduced latency, and large throughput gains. These machines are available in select regions; check Cloud SQL pricing and region documentation for details.

Use Gemini CLI to Deploy Cost-Effective LLM Workloads on GKE

🛠️ Google Cloud demonstrates how the Gemini CLI and GKE Inference Quickstart integrate via the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to streamline selecting, benchmarking, and deploying LLMs on GKE. The post outlines installation steps, example prompts to discover cost and performance trade-offs, and how manifests can be generated for target accelerators. This approach reduces manual tuning and provides data-driven recommendations to optimize cost-per-token while preserving performance.

Moloco and Google Cloud Power AI Vector Search in Retail

🔎 Moloco’s AI-native retail media platform, integrated with Vertex AI Vector Search on Google Cloud, delivers semantic, real-time ad retrieval and personalized recommendations. The joint architecture uses TPUs and GPUs for model training and scoring while vector search runs efficiently on CPUs, enabling outcomes-based bidding at scale. Internal benchmarks report ~10x capacity, up to ~25% lower p95 latency, and a ~4% revenue uplift. The managed service reduces operational overhead and accelerates time-to-value for retailers.

Google's 2025 Cybersecurity Initiative: New Protections

🔒 Google is expanding protections during Cybersecurity Awareness Month 2025 with new features and guidance to counter scams and AI-driven threats. The company outlines a cohesive strategy for securing the AI ecosystem and introduces six new anti-scam measures to help users stay safe. It also launches Recovery Contacts to simplify account recovery and debuts CodeMender, an AI agent that automates code security. Additional updates support safer learning through responsible tools and partnerships.

Vertex AI SDK Adds Prompt Management for Enterprises

🛠️ Google Cloud announced General Availability of Prompt Management in the Vertex AI SDK, enabling teams to programmatically create, version, and manage prompts as first-class assets. The capability bridges Vertex AI Studio’s visual prompt design with SDK-driven automation to improve collaboration, reproducibility, and lifecycle control. Enterprise security and compliance are supported via CMEK and VPCSC, and the SDK exposes simple Python methods to create, list, update, and delete prompt resources tied to models such as gemini-2.5-flash. Get started using the documented code examples to centralize prompt governance and scale generative AI workflows.

North Korean Group Adopts EtherHiding for Malware Campaign

🔐 Google Threat Intelligence has linked a campaign to UNC5342, a cluster tied to North Korea, that now uses EtherHiding to distribute malware via smart contracts on public blockchains such as BNB Smart Chain and Ethereum. The attackers lure developers through LinkedIn recruitment ruses, move conversations to Telegram or Discord, and deliver npm-package downloaders that chain into BeaverTail, JADESNOW, and the Python backdoor InvisibleFerret. By embedding payloads in on-chain contracts, the group turns blockchains into tamper-resistant dead-drops that are hard to takedown and easy to update, enabling sustained cryptocurrency theft and long-term espionage.

ThreatsDay Bulletin: $15B Crypto Seizure, Weekly Risks

🔔 This week’s ThreatsDay bulletin highlights a historic U.S. DOJ seizure of roughly $15 billion in cryptocurrency linked to an alleged transnational fraud network, alongside active commodity malware, phishing-as-a-service, and novel abuses of legitimate tools. Notable incidents include the Brazil-distributed Maverick banking trojan spread via a WhatsApp worm, consumer-grade interception of geostationary satellite traffic, and UEFI BombShell flaws enabling bootkit persistence. Priorities: identity resilience, patching, and monitoring of remote-access and cloud services.

Young Europeans’ Digital Aspirations and Future Skills

🔍 Janice Richardson, researcher and Council of Europe expert, reflects on Google’s Future Report, based on more than 7,000 teens from seven EU countries. She highlights young people’s use of the internet for learning, cultural exploration and creative problem solving, noting strong critical thinking and pragmatic attitudes toward algorithms. Richardson stresses closing the digital literacy gap and equipping teachers and parents to support safe, balanced online engagement.

Supporting Teens Online: Beyond Bans Toward Guidance

👪 The early teen years are pivotal for digital development, and trust between parents and teens matters more than any single setting. Tools like Family Link and YouTube’s supervised experience are valuable, but parents juggling multiple children, apps and devices need simpler solutions—AI assistants could configure age- and app-specific controls. Rather than blanket bans, the piece calls for thoughtful restrictions developed with parents, schools and communities alongside independent digital literacy standards.

YouTube Experiences Worldwide Outage With Playback Error

⚠️ Users worldwide are reporting a widespread YouTube outage causing playback errors and site load failures across web and mobile. Reports began within the last 30 minutes and affected regions include the U.S., Europe, India, Japan, and Australia, according to outage aggregator DownDetector. Some users see messages such as "Playback error" or "Something went wrong," while others experience slow or incomplete page loads. Google has not yet confirmed a cause; it remains unclear whether the issue stems from server problems, maintenance, or network disruptions.

Ultimate Prompting Guide for Veo 3.1 on Vertex AI Preview

🎬 This guide introduces Veo 3.1, Google Cloud's improved generative video model available in preview on Vertex AI, and explains how to move beyond "prompt and pray" toward deliberate creative control. It highlights core capabilities—high-fidelity 720p/1080p output, variable clip lengths, synchronized dialogue and sound effects, and stronger image-to-video fidelity. The article presents a five-part prompting formula and detailed techniques for cinematography, soundstage direction, negative prompting, and timestamped scenes. It also describes advanced multi-step workflows that combine Gemini 2.5 Flash Image to produce consistent characters and controlled transitions, and notes SynthID watermarking and certain current limitations.

Safer Learning: Secure Tools and Partnerships for Education

🔒 Google for Education highlights built-in security, responsible AI, and partnerships to create safer digital learning environments for schools, classrooms, and families. Admins benefit from automated 24/7 monitoring, encryption, spam filtering, and security alerts; Google reports zero successful ransomware attacks on Chromebooks to date. Gemini for Education and NotebookLM provide enterprise-grade data protections with admin controls and age-specific safeguards, while family resources and a $25M Google.org clinics fund extend protection and workforce development.

Vertex AI Context Caching: Reduce Cost and Latency

⚡ Vertex AI context caching saves and reuses precomputed input tokens so developers avoid repeatedly sending and recomputing long contextual content, reducing latency and cost for large-context AI applications. It provides implicit caching — automatic, default, short-lived KV caches (deleted within 24 hours) integrated with Provisioned Throughput — and explicit CachedContent objects that are paid once and then reused at a deep discount with optional CMEK protection. Caches support multimodal inputs and very large context windows.

Google Named a Leader in the 2025 Gartner SIEM Magic Quadrant

🔒 Google Security Operations has been named a Leader in the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for SIEM, recognized for both Ability to Execute and highest Completeness of Vision. The AI-driven platform leverages Gemini to automate data analysis, assist investigations with natural language, and orchestrate responses, combining curated detections, SOAR, and case-centric workflows. Customers report measurable outcomes — up to 240% ROI over three years, 50% faster MTTR, and 65% faster MTTI — driven by automation and an emerging agentic SOC vision.

Google introduces Recovery Contacts to aid account recovery

🔒 Google is introducing Recovery Contacts, a new account-recovery option that lets you designate trusted friends or family to help regain access if you lose a password or device. When you request help, you share a one-time verification code with your chosen contact; they receive an email or notification and confirm the code to verify it’s really you. Your recovery contact will not have access to your account or personal data. The feature complements passkeys and existing recovery tools and is rolling out now.