New A5X bare-metal instances built on NVIDIA's Vera Rubin NVL72 systems are live, with general availability planned for November 2026
Google Cloud plans to stretch its NVIDIA Vera Rubin infrastructure to as many as 960,000 GPUs. The vehicle for that expansion is a new family of A5X instances built on NVIDIA’s Vera Rubin NVL72 systems.
The A5X instances are bare-metal. Customers get direct access to the physical hardware, without a virtualization layer sitting between their software and the chips.
Each instance is powered by NVIDIA’s Vera Rubin NVL72 rack. A single rack combines 72 Rubin GPUs and 36 Vera CPUs, all linked together with NVLink 6.
Scaling beyond a single rack requires a different kind of plumbing. Google is leaning on its Virgo networking fabric and NVIDIA ConnectX-9 SuperNICs to link systems together across multiple sites.
The headline numbers are aggressive. The A5X instances reportedly deliver up to 10 times lower inference cost per token than the previous generation. They are also claimed to offer up to 10 times higher throughput per megawatt.
NVIDIA launched the Vera Rubin platform on January 5, 2026. Google then announced the A5X instances at its Google Cloud Next event in April 2026.
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The first A5X instances went live on October 21, 2026. General availability is planned for November 2026.
The first customer is Ineffable Intelligence, a London-based company. It is using A5X to run complex reinforcement learning systems.
Google has also signaled a planned European expansion for the infrastructure. No specific sites or dates for that rollout appear in the announcement materials.
There are real risks to track. The 960,000 GPU figure is a stated capacity ceiling across multisite deployments, not a count of chips already running.
The next markers to watch are the November 2026 general availability date and any concrete details on the European expansion.