Google Cloud Next 2025 + Starburst

For the third year in a row, Starburst had a productive week with our customers and partners as a sponsor for Google Cloud Next 2025. As always, we’re big Google Cloud Platform (GCP) fans. Look at our happy, smiling faces (below). 

Why we’re excited about Starburst + GCP

We’ve always been excited by the Google cloud ecosystem at Starburst. But we’re especially excited about what announcements made at the conference mean for both Starburst and Google. For us, it’s about the future direction of travel, and especially about AI. 

Today, we already help organizations of all sizes transform data analytics and accelerate AI innovations for organizations across industries. Available through the GCP Marketplace, Starburst empowers our joint customers to quickly unlock lightning-fast data architecture across multiple use cases and multiple data sources. Organizations today are using GCP + Starburst to power their analytics, data applications, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) workflows. And now, we’re set to double down on that trajectory. 

Why 2025 is all about AI, and Google Cloud is a big part of it

With deep, strategic integrations to native Google Cloud services like Looker and BigQuery, Starburst let’s you build the data foundation for all your data–both analytics and AI. And the best part is it works for data wherever it lives–whether that’s in the cloud, across clouds, or on-premises. Plus, Starburst is the only lakehouse query engine certified for Google Distributed Cloud, ensuring enterprise-grade analytics, security, and compliance for even the most sensitive and regulated environments. This is particularly important in high-compliance industries like finance, insurance, healthcare, and the public sector. 

In this article, we’ll talk about key announcements that caught our attention, including Google’s new Agent2Agent protocol and how Gemini will be available on Google Distributed Cloud (GDC). We’ll dive into how Starburst fits into your GCP ecosystem and complements your BigQuery workloads. Finally, we’ll discuss what the future looks like for Starburst on GCP. 

Ready? Let’s get started. 

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) + Starburst = Agentic AI 

At Next 2025, Google made an impressive 229 announcements across their AI, data analytics, and infrastructure cloud services. Collectively, these highlighted the incredible ways customers are leveraging technology to disrupt their industries. While we can’t cover all 200+ announcements, there are several that stand out in the data and analytics space that are indicative of market demand for rapid AI innovation. 

Paving the way for Agentic AI with Agent to Agent (A2A)

Google’s new Agent to Agent (A2A) protocol signals a shift toward more open and interoperable AI ecosystems. Alongside Anthropic’s Model Constitution Protocol (MCP), which enables agents to follow modular and human-aligned rulesets, A2A lays the groundwork for autonomous agents to interface directly with enterprise systems. For data infrastructure, this introduces a new frontier: agents that not only use data but also interact with data platforms as peers. Starburst and other open data platforms are well-positioned in the use paradigm. 

Watch this space. Starburst + AI is just getting started. 

AI everywhere – not just in the cloud!

Google’s new offering brings Gemini AI models to on-premises environments via Google Distributed Cloud. This is big news for enterprises with strict data residency, data sovereignty, regulatory, or security requirements. 

Starburst already helps customers access and analyze on-premises data without moving it–bringing true choice back to your data architecture. now imagine pairing that with airgapped AI. AI run using private, local LLMs directly connecting to sensitive data in compliance with legislation and regulatory requirements? 

Very cool. And very doable. 

This is exactly what Starburst is bringing to AI, and we’re excited that Google is part of that story. 

Create SQL-based AI using BigQuery + Vertex AI

Another reason to get excited? Using SQL to do AI. 

At Google Next, BigQuery and Vertex AI took a major leap toward convergence, with new capabilities for building and running AI workflows directly from SQL. 

Starburst has long championed SQL as the most accessible way to unlock data, helping teams use the language they already know. Now imagine chaining powerful AI models, fine-tuned pipelines, and predictive workflows, all from a SQL prompt, no Python required. 

This is our vision. And we’re working hard to make it a reality in the very near future. Once again, watch this space. 

Better Together: GCP + Starburst 

GCP and Starburst are complementary technologies. Working together, they offer a powerful combination for organizations with complex data needs. 

While BigQuery excels as a fully managed cloud data warehouse, some GCP customers require high-performance analytics across hybrid or on-premises environments where the public cloud alone isn’t a fit. 

Meanwhile, Starburst enables these customers to bring choice back to their data architecture, allowing data federation across BigQuery, on-premises data sources, and multi-cloud data sources. For the first time, you get to choose how much centralization or decentralization works for your business, all while delivering fast, scalable analytics and AI. 

This approach is particularly ideal for large-scale, distributed workloads, ensuring agility and cost efficiency while extending the reach of GCP’s native services to all enterprise data, wherever it resides. 

Case Study: ZoomInfo

The best part? This isn’t just something happening in the future, it’s happening today with real customers. 

ZoomInfo + AI

Take ZoomInfo, for example. They provide a leading go-to-market intelligence platform that empowers businesses to find, acquire, and grow their customer base with accurate, real-time data and advanced analytics. To do this, they integrate high-quality customer contact and company data, AI-driven insights, automation tools, and outreach features to help organizations accelerate revenue growth. 

In order to provide their customers with these cutting-edge services, ZoomInfo must be able to quickly, accurately, and securely prepare, analyze, and distribute data from disparate data sources across their entire data stack.

The very real problem of data silos

Like many organizations managing complex, high-velocity data landscapes, ZoomInfo had siloed data that was difficult to access across multiple clouds and data sources. In the past, resolving this required them to perform manual, time-consuming data preparation processes in order to get the data to their consumers, delaying insights to the business. Not only that, but tracing data origins to maintain data accuracy posed its own set of challenges that required complex cross-system and cross-team collaboration. 

Something had to change. Enter Starburst. 

ZoomInfo + Starburst

By leveraging Starburst’s federated query capability, ZoomInfo could build a decentralized data architecture. This enables them to trace record-level data lineage without the need to duplicate data, manage complicated cross-system integrations, or a complex data model. 

Using this approach, not only were they able to accelerate data access for their data consumers and improve their time to insights; they were also able to leverage Starburst to maintain their data integrity and transparency, critical for the services they provide.  

Why Starburst + GCP paves the way for the AI workflows of the future

The future of AI is clear. As more customers embrace AI-driven applications, Starburst is poised to serve as the foundational data layer alongside native Google Cloud services, ensuring every AI initiative is built on a robust, agile, and future-proof data architecture. 

Starburst + GCP

We’re excited to grow our partnership with Google in this rapidly evolving space which will include enhancing integrations for existing services such as Big Query, expanding the scope of data available to be used in the GCP ecosystem, and publishing new Marketplace listings to make getting started with Starburst on Google Distribute Cloud easier than ever. 

Starburst: Rocketfuel for AI

Want to hear more? If you want to stay up to speed on the latest and greatest coming from Starburst, join us in May as we celebrate the launch of new features and AI capabilities coming directly to the Starburst platform.