Today, we are thrilled to announce C4A metal, our first bare metal instance running on Google Axion processors, available in preview soon. C4A metal is designed for specialized workloads that require direct hardware access and Arm®-native compatibility.

Now, organizations running environments such as Android development, automotive simulation, CI/CD pipelines, security workloads, and custom hypervisors can run them on Google Cloud, without the performance overheads and complexity of nested virtualization.

C4A metal instances, like other Axion instances, are built on the standard Arm architecture, so your applications and operating systems compiled for Arm remain portable across your cloud, on-premises, and edge environments, protecting your development investment. C4A metal offers 96 vCPUs, 768GB of DDR5 memory, up to 100Gbps of networking bandwidth, with full support for Google Cloud Hyperdisk including Hyperdisk Balanced, Extreme, Throughput, and ML block storage options.

Google Cloud provides workload-optimized infrastructure to ensure the right resources are available for every task. C4A metal, like the Google Cloud Axion virtual machine family, is powered by Titanium, a key component for multi-tier offloads and security that is foundational to our infrastructure. Titanium’s custom-designed silicon offloads networking and storage processing to free up the CPU, and its dedicated SmartNIC manages all I/O, ensuring that Axion cores are reserved exclusively for your application’s performance. Titanium is part of Google Cloud’s vertically integrated software stack — from the custom silicon in our servers to our planet-scale network traversing 7.75 million kilometers of terrestrial and subsea fiber across 42 regions — that is engineered to maximize efficiency and provide the ultra-low latency and high bandwidth to customers at global scale.

Architectural parity for automotive workloads

Automotive customers can benefit from the Arm architecture’s performance, efficiency, and flexible design for in-vehicle systems such as infotainment and Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS). Axion C4A metal instances enable architectural parity between test environments and production silicon, allowing automotive technology providers to validate their software on the same Arm Neoverse instruction set architecture (ISA) used in production electronic control units (ECUs). This significantly reduces the risk of late-stage integration failures. For performance-sensitive tasks, these customers can execute demanding virtual hardware-in-the-loop (vHIL) simulations with the consistent, low-latency performance of physical hardware, ensuring test results are reliable and accurate. Finally, C4A metal lets providers move beyond the constraints of a physical lab, by dynamically scaling entire test farms and transforming them from fixed capital expenses into flexible operational ones.

“In the era of AI-defined vehicles, the accelerating pace and complexity of technology are pushing us to rethink traditional linear approaches to software development. Google Cloud’s introduction of Axion C4A metal is a major step forward in this journey. By offering full architectural parity on Arm between test environments and physical silicon, customers can benefit from accelerated development cycles, enabling continuous integration and compliance for a variety of specialized use cases.“ - Dipti Vachani, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Automotive Business, Arm

“Our partners and customers rely on QNX to deliver the safety, security, reliability, and real-time performance required for their most mission-critical systems — from advanced driver assistance to digital cockpits. As the Software-Defined Vehicle era continues to gain momentum, decoupling software development from physical hardware is no longer optional — it’s essential for innovation at scale. The launch of Google Cloud’s C4A-metal instances on Axion introduces a powerful ARM-based bare metal platform that we are eager to test and support as this will enable transformative cloud infrastructure benefits for our automotive ecosystem.” - Grant Courville, Senior Vice President, Products and Strategy, QNX

“The future of automotive mobility demands unprecedented speed and precision in practice and development. For automakers and suppliers leveraging the Snapdragon Digital Chassis platform, aligning their cloud development and testing environments to ensure parity with the Snapdragon SoCs in the vehicle is absolutely crucial for efficiency and quality. We are excited about Google Cloud’s commitment to this segment — offering C4A-metal instances with Axion is a massive leap forward, giving the automotive ecosystem a true 1:1 physical to virtual environment in the cloud. This breakthrough significantly reduces integration challenges, slashes validation time, and allows our partners to unleash AI-driven features to market faster at scale.” - Laxmi Rayapudi, VP, Product Management, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc.

Align test and production for Android development

The Android platform was built for Arm-based processors, the standard for virtually all mobile devices. By running development and testing pipelines on the bare-metal instances of Axion processors with C4A metal, Android developers can benefit from native performance, eliminating the overhead of emulation management, such as slow instruction-by-instruction translation layers. In addition, they can significantly reduce latency for Android build toolchains and automated test systems, leading to faster feedback cycles. C4A metal also solves the performance challenges of nested virtualization, making it a great platform for scalable Cuttlefish (Cloud Android) environments.

Once available, developers can deploy scalable Cuttlefish environment farms on top C4A metal instances with an upcoming release of Horizon or by directly leveraging Cloud Android Orchestration. C4A metal allows these virtual devices to run directly on the physical hardware, providing the performance needed to build and manage large, high-fidelity test farms for true continuous testing.

Bare metal access without compromise

As a cloud offering, C4A metal enables a lower total cost of ownership by replacing the entire lifecycle of physical hardware procurement and management with a predictable operational expense. This eliminates the direct capital expenditures of purchasing servers, along with the associated operational costs of hardware maintenance contracts, power, cooling, and physical data center space. You can programmatically provision and de-provision instances to match your exact testing demands, ensuring you are not paying for an over-provisioned fleet of servers sitting idle waiting for peak development cycles.

Operating as standard compute resources within your Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), C4A metal instances inherit and leverage the same security policies, audit logging, and network controls as virtual machines. Instances are designed to appear as physical servers to your toolchain and support common monitoring and security agents, allowing for straightforward integration with your existing Google Cloud environments. This integration extends to storage, where network-attached Hyperdisk allows you to manage persistent disks using the same snapshot and resizing tools your teams already use for your virtual machine fleet.

“For our build system, true isolation is paramount. Running on Google Cloud’s new C4A metal instance on Axion enables us to isolate our package builds with a strong hypervisor security boundary without compromising on build performance.“ - Matthew Moore, Founder and CTO, Chainguard, Inc

Better together: the Axion C and N series

The addition of C4A metal to the Arm-based Axion portfolio allows customers to lower TCO by matching the right infrastructure to every workload. While Axion C4A virtual machines optimize for consistently high performance and N4A virtual machines (now in preview) optimize for price-performance and flexibility, C4A metal addresses the critical need for direct hardware access by specialized applications that require a non-virtualized Arm environment.

For example, an Android development company could create a highly efficient CI/CD pipeline by using C4A virtual machines for the build farm. For large-scale testing, they could use C4A metal to run Cuttlefish virtual devices directly on the physical hardware, eliminating nested virtualization overhead. To enable even higher fidelity, they can run Cuttlefish hybrid devices on C4A metal, reusing the system images from their physical hardware. Concurrently, supporting infrastructure such as CI/CD orchestrators and artifact repositories could run on cost-effective N4A instances, using Custom Machine Types to right-size resources and minimize operational expenses.

Coming soon to preview

C4A metal is scheduled for preview soon. Please fill this form to sign up for early access and additional updates.

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