In 2025 Google Cloud added G4, powered by NVIDIA's RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs to their offering, allowing them to offer hardware not only for AI applications, but also for other applications, such as rendering, simulations or gaming. A single G4 instance with one accelerator (g4-standard-48) comes equipped with 48 CPU cores, 180 gigabytes of RAM and 96 gigabytes of GPU memory. This is a lot of resources for a single cloud workstation, that only the most demanding workstreams would utilize. Most professionals who require a graphics accelerator to do their job, don't really need this much compute power for day to day tasks. It wasn't financially reasonable to pay for a G4 instance, when you weren't utilizing all the resources you paid for. If only there were smaller machine types… If only you could share that one very powerful GPU between multiple virtual machines…
Introducing fractional VMs!
During Google Cloud Next 2026, Google announced GA for fractional G4 VMs and was the first provider to bring vGPU functionality to RTX PRO 6000 accelerators. vGPU stands for virtual graphical processing unit. Just like VMs (virtual machines) are a way to split one physical computer into smaller, independent systems, vGPU allows for a single physical accelerator to be split into 2, 4 or 8 virtual accelerators! The new fractional machine types (g4-standard-24, g4-standard-12, g4-standard-6) now allow you to perfectly match the compute capabilities to your needs!
Who is it for?
The existence of those new machine types makes it much more cost-efficient to move many GPU-dependent tasks to the cloud. Replacing physical workstations in offices with cloud infrastructure is not a new thing, but till now, Google Cloud didn't offer a good platform for those who needed workstations to process images, post-process videos, simulate physics or render 3D graphics. Those users now can get exactly the hardware they need, allowing their companies to move away from maintaining physical workstations and replacing them with virtual ones.
How to get it?
The new machine types are available for new Compute Engine instances and GKE nodes. If you are creating a Compute Instance, remember to install the correct drivers, so that you can utilize your virtual accelerator without any issues.
Creation of a fractional VM is no different from a regular VM. For example, to create a Compute Engine instance, you can use a gcloud command:
gcloud compute instances create $VM_NAME \
--machine-type=g4-standard-6 \
--zone=us-central1-b \
--boot-disk-size=$DISK_SIZE \
--maintenance-policy=TERMINATE \
--restart-on-failure
Or you can use Cloud Console:
Similarly, for GKE you can specify the new machine types (g4-standard-6, g4-standard-12 and g4-standard-24) to create a new Node Pool:
gcloud container node-pools create POOL_NAME \
--cluster CLUSTER_NAME \
--location=CONTROL_PLANE_LOCATION \
--machine-type=g4-standard-24
Or in Cloud Console:
The vGPU support is currently rolled out only to one zone: us-central1-b. However, it's only a matter of time before it's available in more regions. Keep an eye on the documentation page to find which zones support which GPUs. To stay up to date, follow the Google Cloud blog and subscribe to Google Cloud YouTube channel to not miss any updates!
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