Here are the top 10 biggest Google Cloud news stories of 2024—from Gemini and AI innovation to failed acquisitions and executive departures.

Google Cloud achieved some major milestones in 2024 as the company took its Gemini AI portfolio to new heights, invested significantly in partners around generative AI and hired some top-notch executive talent.

However, the now $45 billion Mountain View, Calif.-based cloud giant also took some big hits this year including two blockbuster acquisitions falling through and the U.S. government currently seeking a potential break-up of Google.

CRN takes a deep dive into the top 10 most important Google Cloud news stories of 2024 that every partner, investor and customer should know about.

[Related: The 10 Biggest AWS News Stories Of 2024: CEO Exit, AI And Partners]

No. 10: Historic Revenue And Market Share; Sales Growth Faster Than AWS, Microsoft

Google Cloud generated a record $11.4 billion in sales during the third quarter of 2024, meaning the company currently has more than a $45 billion annual revenue run rate.

Google Cloud has been growing cloud sales at a faster rate compared to its two main cloud rivals, Microsoft and AWS. For example, in its third quarter of 2024, Google Cloud increased sales by 35 percent year over year, compared to Microsoft’s cloud sales growth of 20 percent and AWS’ 19 percent revenue growth.

Additionally, for the first time ever, Google Cloud captured a 13 percent share of the global cloud infrastructure services market, according to data from IT market research firm Synergy Research. AWS won 31 percent global share, followed by Microsoft at No. 2 with 20 percent share.

Google Cloud had previously achieved between 11 percent- and 12 percent-share of the worldwide cloud market over the past two years, but the company has consistently grown over the past several quarters. For example, Google Cloud won 11 percent global cloud market share in Q3 2023, 12 percent share in Q2 2024, and now 13 percent share in Q3 2024.

The Takeaway: Google Cloud is growing cloud sales at a faster rate than its two cloud rivals, AWS and Microsoft. Although Google Cloud’s total revenue isn’t as large as its two competitors, Google’s growing cloud market share growth over the past 12 months is huge. This all bodes well for Google Cloud in 2025.

No. 9: U.S. Government Trying To Force Google To Divest Chrome; Google Fires Back

Google Chrome is the most popular web browser on the planet. Chrome is deeply integrated with much of Google Cloud security and management products like Chrome Enterprise Core.

In late 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice officially requested that Google be forced to sell Chrome in a move that would reshape Google Cloud’s $88 billion parent company Alphabet.

“For more than a decade, Google has unlawfully maintained its monopolies in general search services and search text advertising through a web of anti-competitive practices,” said the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) in a November filing in the U.S. District Court of Columbia.

“Google has manipulated its control of Chrome and Android to benefit itself, while sharing monopoly profits under conditions to induce third parties across the ecosystem to help Google maintain its monopolies,” said the DOJ. “The remedy must close this gap and deprive Google of these advantages. … To address these challenges, Google must divest Chrome which has fortified [Google’s] dominance.”

Google fired shots back at the DOJ with Google’s Kent Walker, president of global affairs and chief legal officer for Google, calling the DOJ proposal “staggering.”

“[The] DOJ chose to push a radical interventionist agenda that would harm Americans and America’s global technology leadership,” Walker said. “DOJ’s wildly overbroad proposal goes miles beyond the Court’s decision. It would break a range of Google products—even beyond Search—that people love and find helpful in their everyday lives.”

The case will officially begin in April 2025.

The Takeaway: If Google is forced to sell off Chrome next year, it will be a major blow to Google Cloud’s R&D budget and innovation capabilities, particularly in the key areas of AI and data modernization. However, Google partners believe it is highly unlikely that a forced sell-off of Chrome will happen.

Click through to read the other eight biggest Google Cloud news stories of 2024.

No. 8: Google’s Big GenAI Partner Push

In early 2024, Google Cloud made the bold investment decision of increasing its incentives and other channel programs by upwards of 10X for system integrators and software vendors to implement Google’s generative AI solutions.

This year, Google Cloud doubled rewards for services partners who drive more workload adoption and accelerate adoption of key AI products. Additionally, Google grew its new logo incentives for sales and services partners across both Google Workspace and the Google Cloud Platform.

The company also launched in 2025 a new generative AI services specialization, GenAI training bootcamps for partners, and injected AI into its major partner tools like Partner Hub and Delivery Navigator Portal.

“We are committed to supporting our partners at every level of our AI stack, with a partner-led approach to services and delivery; growing incentives and rewards; new opportunities for training and differentiation; and optimized routes-to-market to help partners close larger deals faster, and more often,” said Kevin Ichhpurani, corporate vice president of Global Ecosystem and Channels at Google Cloud. earlier this year.

One of the biggest benefits Google partners saw this year was the launch of Google Cloud’s new AI Agent program that looks to help partners scale AI agent sales and drive customer AI. The new program sees Google build and co-innovate AI agents with partners via new technical and go-to-market resources. Google also launched new AI Agent Space on the Google Cloud Marketplace, with the goal of enabling customers to more easily find and deploy partner-built AI agents.

The Takeaway: Google Cloud checked all the channel boxes in 2024 when it comes to partner incentives, co-innovation and new resources to drive GenAI sales and customer adoption.

No. 7: Google Cloud Eliminates Egress Fees In Monumental Move

Google Cloud changed the cloud computing world this year by eliminating exit fees for customers leaving GCP for the competition.

In a historic move, Google Cloud began to no longer charge customers egress fees for moving data from GCP to another cloud provider or migrating workloads to on-premises data centers. The change applied to customers transferring entire workloads to a competitors platforms, not for customers making routine data transfers while still retaining Google services.

The company cut transfer fees for customers deployments in data-related services including Google’s Bigquery, Cloud Storage, Datastore, Cloud SQL and more.

The move was so significant that, just months after announcing it, Microsoft and AWS made similar moves to remove egress fees when migrating data to other clouds or on-premises.

The Takeaway: Although Google was relatively late to cloud computing compared to AWS and Microsoft, Google Cloud’s egress fee decision paved the way for the entire industry to make this substantial change. Google Cloud was definitely a first mover versus a fast follower.

No. 6: Google’s Data Center And AI Infrastructure Investments

Google has invested billions around building new data centers and cloud infrastructure across the globe in 2024, as well as on AI-specific chips such as its Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) and Arm-based Axion CPUs for cloud customers.

Google’s sixth-generation and most powerful TPU, Trillium, became generally available in December.

Also in December, Google unveiled a new quantum chip, Willow, which Google said can outperform the world’s best supercomputers.

On the data center front, which powers its cloud and AI solutions, Google unveiled plans this year to build a new $1 billion data center campus in Kansas City; to construct a $576 million data center in Cedar Rapids, Iowa; as well to spent $1.1 billion to expand its Finland data center campus.

Google unveiled data center expansion plans for 2025 in Mexico, Malaysia, Thailand, New Zealand, Greece, Norway, Austria and Sweden.

The Takeaway: This year, Google made big moves to become a more dominant hardware provider in the AI era.

No. 5: Big Google Executive Exits And Hires In 2024

Google Cloud saw the departure of several top-level executives, while at the same time, hiring some big names in 2024.

Google Cloud’s Baskar Sridharan (pictured) left this year for rival AWS. Sridharan spent over five years at Google Cloud most recently as vice president of engineering for the Google Cloud Platform, where he managed the engineering team for Google Compute Infrastructure as well as several product management teams.

Google Cloud also lost its general manager of cloud operations and business platform, Amit Zavery, who left this year to join ServiceNow. He was part of Google Cloud’s leadership team since 2019, reporting directly to CEO Thomas Kurian, with Zavery managing various teams and P&L areas around engineering, products, design, business planning, Google’s commerce platform and commercialization.

On the hiring front, Google Cloud hired longtime Microsoft executive Oliver Parker as its new leader to drive its global AI go-to-market strategy. Parker, who has over 18 years of experience at rival Microsoft, is now Google Cloud’s new vice president of artificial intelligence, tasked with the company’s AI go-to-market strategy and leader of a newly formed global organization of sales and technical resources responsible for advancing Google Cloud’s AI portfolio.

Google Cloud also hired 11-year Microsoft veteran and top Copilot executive, Saurabh Tiwary as its new general manager and vice president for Google’s cloud AI business.

Another huge hire was AWS Vice President Raj Pai as Google Cloud’s new vice president for its Cloud AI business. He was at AWS for 10 years before jumping to Google Cloud in late June. Pai is now leading the product management team for Google Cloud AI unit.

The Takeaway: Although Google Cloud lost some top talent this year, the company also nabbed some of the industry’s top AI innovators.

No. 4: Google Workspace Renewal Margin Cut; New Incentive Takes Hold

Many Google Cloud partners received a significant blow in 2024 with Google cutting Workspace renewal margins by 40 percent this year.

The changes set channel margins for Google Workspace renewals at 12 percent, down from 20 percent previously.

Some partners were also upset Google only gave a one-month notice on this renewal license change that took effect in April.

Google told CRN that it is shifting away from up-front discounting toward more consumption-based incentives. Google is encouraging partners this year to win new business and grow their customer base instead of relying on re-signing Workspace renewals contracts every year.

However, around the same time as the Workspace renewal margin cut, Google announced that partners who win new Workspace business will receive 60 percent margin for the first year.

“For year one, we are giving 60 percent margin to partners for new Workspace business—that’s more than Google makes. So the majority of it is going to the partner,” Google’s global channel chief Ichhpurani told CRN at the time. “I don’t think you could point to another large technology company that’s ever done something like this: 60 percent margin. And that’s not ‘up to’ 60 percent, but actually 60 percent.”

The Takeaway: Google’s statement to Workspace partners this year was that renewals aren’t nearly as important compared to winning new business. The shift has changed the way many smaller Google Cloud partners sell Workspace to customers.

No. 3: Google Revamps Gemini; Hires Character.AI Leaders

Google revamped its Gemini AI models this year while injecting more of Gemini’s AI capabilities into Workspace and Google Cloud services.

“Now, millions of Workspace customers can access the benefits of AI while knowing that their organization’s privacy, security and compliance policies will be upheld,” said Aparna Pappu, general manager and vice president of Workspace, earlier this year.

In 2024, Google launched Gemini Ultra, Gemini Code Assist for Google Cloud, and integrate Gemini into three popular Google Cloud products: BigQuery, Looker and Databases.

In December, the company unveiled Gemini 2.0. “With new advances in multimodality—like native image and audio output — and native tool use, it will enable us to build new AI agents that bring us closer to our vision of a universal assistant,” said Google CEO Sundar Pichai this month.

In a bold move this year, Google hired Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas—co-founders and leaders of the popular AI chatbot startup, Character.AI—to help lead Google’s AI research business unit, DeepMind. Shazeer is now a leader of Google’s Gemini AI unit.

Google also signed an agreement with Character.AI to provide Google a non-exclusive license to the startup’s large language model technology with the goal of building more personalized AI products for users.

There are now more than 2 million developers using Gemini across Google’s developer tools.

The Takeaway: Google Gemini received a significant amount of investment dollars from parent company Alphabet in 2024, showing the company’s willingness to enhance Gemini. Customers should expect the same amount of investment and innovation around Gemini next year as well.

No. 2: Huge HubSpot And Wiz Acquisitions Fall Through

Google Cloud is not known for making large acquisitions on an annual basis. However, the AI era could change that.

Google was reportedly set to make two huge acquisitions in 2024, including for CRM giant HubSpot and the ultra-hot cybersecurity AI startup Wiz.

Reports emerged this summer that Google was looking to beef up its cloud and AI security offerings by acquiring Wiz for approximately $23 billion. Founded in 2020, startup Wiz is one of the hottest players in cybersecurity with annual recurring revenue surpassing $350 million. However, this deal ultimately dissolved as Wiz said it ultimately wanted to remain independent.

Additionally, Google was reportedly looking to spend billions on acquiring HubSpot to boost its CRM technology and customer base. HubSpot generated over $2 billion in revenue last year with a current market cap of over $24 billion. However, the deal fell apart.

Google currently has well over $20 billion in cash and cash equivalents.

The Takeaway: These potential acquisitions are big news because Google was looking to make a big M&A splash in 2024, but nothing happened. The big news is that Google appears to be ready to make a potential game-changing acquisition in 2025.

No. 1: Google’s AI Innovation And Portfolio Hits An All-Time High

Nearly every product launch and major Google conference this year revolved around artificial intelligence and GenAI.

From launching new AI-powered security solutions and AI Agents, to injecting Gemini into most of Google Cloud’s most popular offerings like Workspace and BigQuery—2024 was the year Google Cloud solidified its product portfolio to nearly all be AI-powered.

Some of the biggest AI highlights include Gemini 2.0, Vertex AI Agent Builder brings together foundation models, Google Search and other developer tools to make it easy for customers to build and deploy agents; Google Threat Intelligence security offering with GenAI-powered capabilities for protection against threats; and Gemini inside Google Security Operations.

One big launch for the channel was the new Partner Companion collaborator that helps partners enhance their service delivery.

Google Cloud also formed blockbuster partnerships with the likes of Character.AI and Anthropic.

“The momentum across the company is extraordinary. Our commitment to innovation, as well as our long-term focus and investment in AI, are paying off with consumers and partners benefiting from our AI tools,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in October. “In cloud, our AI solutions are helping drive deeper product adoption with existing customers, attract new customers and win larger deals.”

The Takeaway: By far, the biggest news coming out of Google Cloud in 2024 was all about AI. The cloud giant’s ability to quickly create new AI solutions—spanning from hardware and software to LLMs and AI agents—appears to be a glimpse of Google Cloud’s future.