Accelerator-optimized machine family

The accelerator-optimized machine family is designed by Google Cloud to deliver the needed performance and efficiency for GPU accelerated workloads such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and high performance computing (HPC).

The accelerator-optimized machine family is available in the following machine series: A4X, A4, A3, A2 and G2. Each machine type within a series has a specific model and number of NVIDIA GPUs attached. You can also attach some GPU models to N1 general-purpose machine types.

Machine series recommendation by workload type

The following section provide the recommended machine series based on your GPU workloads.

Workload type Recommended machine type
Pre-training models A4X, A4, A3 Ultra, A3 Mega, A3 High, and A2

To identify the best fit, see Recommendations for pre-training models in the AI Hypercomputer documentation.
Fine-tuning models A4X, A4, A3 Ultra, A3 Mega, A3 High, and A2

To identify the best fit, see Recommendations for fine-tuning models in the AI Hypercomputer documentation.
Serving inference A4X, A4, A3 Ultra, A3 Mega, A3 High, A3 Edge, and A2

To identify the best fit, see Recommendations for serving inference in the AI Hypercomputer documentation.
Graphics-intensive workloads G2 and N1+T4
High performance computing For high performance computing workloads, any accelerator-optimized machine series works well. The best fit depends on the amount of computation that must be offloaded to the GPU.

For more information, see Recommendations for HPC in the AI Hypercomputer documentation.

Pricing and provisioning options

The accelerator-optimized machine types are billed for their attached GPUs, predefined vCPU, memory, and bundled Local SSD (if applicable). The discounts that can apply to accelerator-optimized instances vary based on the provisioning option that you use as summarized in the following table. For more pricing information for accelerator-optimized instances, see the Accelerator-optimized machine type family section on the VM instance pricing page.

On-demand (default) Spot VMs Flex-start (Preview) Reservations
Supported accelerator-optimized machine series A3 Mega, A3 High, A3 Edge, A2 and G2 A4, A3, A2 and G2 A4, A3, A2 and G2

Support varies based on the type of reservation:
Discounts

You can receive committed use discounts (CUDs) for some resources by purchasing resource-based commitments. However, GPUs and Local SSD disks that you use with on-demand provisioning option aren't eligible for CUDs. If you want to receive CUDs even for GPUs and Local SSD disks, then we recommend that you use the reservations provisioning option instead.

Spot VMs automatically get discounts through Spot VMs pricing.

VMs provisioned by using the flex-start provisioning model automatically get discounts through Dynamic Workload Scheduler pricing.

You can receive CUDs for your accelerator-optimized machine type resources by purchasing resource-based commitments. Note that commitments for any GPUs and Local SSD disks require attached reservations for those resources.

The A4X machine series

The A4X machine series runs on an exascale platform based on NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 rack-scale architecture and has up to 140 vCPUs, and 884 GB of memory. This machine series is optimized for compute and memory intensive, network bound ML training, and HPC workloads. The A4X machine series is available in a single machine type.

VM instances created by using the A4X machine type provide the following features:

  • GPU acceleration with NVIDIA GB200 Superchips: A4X instances have NVIDIA GB200 Superchips automatically attached. These Superchips have NVIDIA B200 GPUs and offer 180 GB memory per GPU. A4X has two sockets with NVIDIA Grace™ CPUs with Arm® Neoverse™ V2 cores. These CPUs are connected to four B200 GPUs with fast chip-to-chip (NVLink-C2C) communication.

  • NVIDIA Grace CPU Platform: A4X instances use the NVIDIA Grace CPU platform. For more details about the platform, see CPU platforms.

  • Industry-leading NVLink scalability: Multi-node NVLink that scales up to 72 GPUs in a single domain. NVIDIA B200 GPUs provide GPU NVLink bandwidth of 1800 GBps, bidirectionally per GPU. With all-to-all NVLink topology between 4 GPUs in a system, the aggregate NVLink Bandwidth is up to 130 TB/s.

  • Enhanced Networking with RoCE: For A4X instances, RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) increases the network performance by combining NVIDIA ConnectX-7 (CX-7) network interface cards (NICs) with Google's datacenter-wide four-way rail-aligned network. By leveraging RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE), the A4X instances achieve much higher throughput between instances in a cluster when compared to A4 instances.

    The CX-7 NICs, physically isolated on a four-way rail-aligned network topology, allows A4X instances to scale out in groups of 72 GPUs to up to thousands of GPUs in a single non-blocking cluster.

  • Increased network speeds: Offers up to 4x networking speeds when compared to instances created by using the A3 machine types.

  • Virtualization optimizations for data transfers and recovery: the Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe) topology of A4X instances provides more accurate locality information that workloads can use to optimize data transfers.

    The GPUs also expose Function Level Reset (FLR) for graceful recovery from failures and atomic operations support for concurrency improvements in certain scenarios.

  • Local SSD and Hyperdisk support: 12,000 GiB of Local SSD is automatically added to A4X instances. Local SSD can be used for fast scratch disks or for feeding data into the GPUs while preventing I/O bottlenecks.

    For applications that require higher storage performance, you can attach up to 512 TiB of Hyperdisk to A4X instances.

  • Dense allocation and topology aware scheduling support: When you provision A4X instances through Cluster Director, you can request blocks of densely allocated capacity. Your host machines are allocated physically close to each other, provisioned as blocks of resources, and are interconnected with a dynamic ML network fabric to minimize network hops and optimize for the lowest latency. Additionally, Cluster Director provides topology information at node and cluster level that can be used for job placement.

A4X machine type

Machine type GPU count GPU memory*
(GB HBM3e)		 vCPU count† VM memory (GB) Attached Local SSD (GiB) Physical NIC count Maximum network bandwidth (GBps)‡
a4x-highgpu-4g 4 720 140 884 12,000 6 2,000

*GPU memory is the memory on a GPU device that can be used for temporary storage of data. It is separate from the VM's memory and is specifically designed to handle the higher bandwidth demands of your graphics-intensive workloads.
†A vCPU is implemented as a single hardware hyper-thread on one of the available CPU platforms.
‡Maximum egress bandwidth cannot exceed the number given. Actual egress bandwidth depends on the destination IP address and other factors. See Network bandwidth.

A4X limitations

  • You can only request capacity by using the supported provisioning options for an A4X machine type.
  • You don't receive sustained use discounts and flexible committed use discounts for VMs that use an A4X machine type.
  • You can only use an A4X machine type in certain regions and zones.
  • You can't use Persistent Disk (regional or zonal) on a VM that uses an A4X machine type.
  • The A4X machine type is only available on the NVIDIA Grace platform.
  • You can't change the machine type of an existing VM to an A4X machine type. You can only create new A4X VMs. After creating a VM using an A4X machine type, you can't change the machine type.
  • You can't run Windows operating systems on an A4X machine type.
  • A4X VMs don't support the following:

Supported disk types for the A4X series

A4X VMs can use the following block storage types:

  • Hyperdisk Balanced (hyperdisk-balanced): this is the only disk type that is supported for the boot disk
  • Hyperdisk Extreme (hyperdisk-extreme)
  • Local SSD: which is automatically added to VMs that are created by using any of the A4X machine types
Maximum number of disks per VM*
Machine types All disks† Hyperdisk Balanced Hyperdisk Throughput Hyperdisk ML Hyperdisk Extreme Attached Local SSD
a4x-highgpu-4g 128 128 N/A N/A 8 32

*Hyperdisk usage is charged separately from machine type pricing. For disk pricing, see Hyperdisk pricing.
†This limit applies to Hyperdisk, but doesn't include Local SSD disks.

Disk and capacity limits

You can use a mixture of different Hyperdisk types with a VM, but the maximum total disk capacity (in TiB) across all disk types can't exceed:

  • For machine types with less than 32 vCPUs: 257 TiB for all Hyperdisk

  • For machine types with 32 or more vCPUs: 512 TiB for all Hyperdisk

For details about the capacity limits, see Hyperdisk size and attachment limits.

The A4 machine series

The A4 machine series offers machine types with up to 224 vCPUs, and 3,968 GB of memory. A4 instances provide up to 3x performance of previous GPU instance types for most GPU accelerated workloads. A4 is recommended for ML training workloads especially at large scales—for example, hundreds or thousands of GPUs. The A4 machine series is available in a single machine type.

VM instances created by using the A4 machine type provide the following features:

  • GPU acceleration with NVIDIA B200 GPUs: NVIDIA B200 GPUs are automatically attached to A4 instances, which offer 180 GB GPU memory per GPU.

  • 5th Generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processor (Emerald Rapids): offers up to 4.0 GHz sustained single-core max turbo frequency. For more information about this processor, see CPU platform.

  • Industry-leading NVLink scalability: NVIDIA B200 GPUs provide GPU NVLink bandwidth of 1,800 GBps, bidirectionally per GPU.

    With all-to-all NVLink topology between 8 GPUs in a system, the aggregate NVLink Bandwidth is up to 14.4 TBps.

  • Enhanced networking with RoCE: RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) increases the network performance by combining NVIDIA ConnectX-7 network interface cards (NICs) with Google's datacenter-wide four-way rail-aligned network. By leveraging RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE), A4 instances achieve much higher throughput between instances in a cluster compared to most A3 instances, except those running on the A3 Ultra machine type.

  • Increased network speeds: Offers up to 4x networking speeds when compared to the previous generation A2 instances.

    For more information about networking, see Network bandwidths and GPUs.

  • Virtualization optimizations for data transfers and recovery: the Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe) topology of A4 instances provides more accurate locality information that workloads can use to optimize data transfers.

    The GPUs also expose Function Level Reset (FLR) for graceful recovery from failures and atomic operations support for concurrency improvements in certain scenarios.

  • Local SSD and Hyperdisk support: 12,000 GiB of Local SSD is automatically added to A4 instances. Local SSD can be used for fast scratch disks or for feeding data into the GPUs while preventing I/O bottlenecks.

    For applications that require higher storage performance, you can also attach up to 512 TiB of Hyperdisk to A4 instances.

  • Dense allocation and topology aware scheduling support: When you provision A4 instances that use the features and services available from Cluster Director, you can request blocks of densely allocated capacity. Your host machines are allocated physically close to each other, provisioned as blocks of resources, and are interconnected with a dynamic ML network fabric to minimize network hops and optimize for the lowest latency. Additionally, you can get topology information at node and cluster level that can be used for job placement.

A4 machine type

Machine type GPU count GPU memory*
(GB HBM3e)		 vCPU count† VM memory (GB) Attached Local SSD (GiB) Physical NIC count Maximum network bandwidth (Gbps)‡
a4-highgpu-8g 8 1,440 224 3,968 12,000 10 3,600

*GPU memory is the memory on a GPU device that can be used for temporary storage of data. It is separate from the VM's memory and is specifically designed to handle the higher bandwidth demands of your graphics-intensive workloads.
†A vCPU is implemented as a single hardware hyper-thread on one of the available CPU platforms.
‡Maximum egress bandwidth cannot exceed the number given. Actual egress bandwidth depends on the destination IP address and other factors. See Network bandwidth.

A4 limitations

  • You can only request capacity by using the supported provisioning options for an A4 machine type.
  • You don't receive sustained use discounts and flexible committed use discounts for VMs that use an A4 machine type.
  • You can only use an A4 machine type in certain regions and zones.
  • You can't use Persistent Disk (regional or zonal) on a VM that uses an A4 machine type.
  • The A4 machine type is only available on the Emerald Rapids CPU platform.
  • You can't change the machine type of an existing VM to an A4 machine type. You can only create new A4 VMs. After creating a VM using an A4 machine type, you can't change the machine type.
  • A4 machine types don't support sole-tenancy.
  • You can't run Windows operating systems on an A4 machine type.

Supported disk types for the A4 series

A4 VMs can use the following block storage types:

  • Hyperdisk Balanced (hyperdisk-balanced): this is the only disk type that is supported for the boot disk
  • Hyperdisk Extreme (hyperdisk-extreme)
  • Local SSD: which is automatically added to VMs that are created by using any of the A4 machine types
Maximum number of disks per VM*
Machine types All disks† Hyperdisk Balanced Hyperdisk Throughput Hyperdisk ML Hyperdisk Extreme Attached Local SSD
a4-highgpu-8g 128 128 N/A N/A 8 32

*Hyperdisk usage is charged separately from machine type pricing. For disk pricing, see Hyperdisk pricing.
†This limit applies to Hyperdisk, but doesn't include Local SSD disks.

Disk and capacity limits

If supported by the machine type, you can use a mixture of Hyperdisk and Persistent Disk volumes on a VM, but the following restrictions apply:

  • The combined number of both Hyperdisk and Persistent Disk volumes can't exceed 128 per VM.

  • The maximum total disk capacity (in TiB) across all disk types can't exceed:

    • For machine types with less than 32 vCPUs:

      • 257 TiB for all Hyperdisk or all Persistent Disk
      • 257 TiB for a mixture of Hyperdisk and Persistent Disk

    • For machine types with 32 or more vCPUs:

      • 512 TiB for all Hyperdisk
      • 512 TiB for a mixture of Hyperdisk and Persistent Disk
      • 257 TiB for all Persistent Disk

For details about the capacity limits, see Hyperdisk size and attachment limits and Persistent Disk maximum capacity.

The A3 machine series

The A3 machine series has up to 224 vCPUs, and 2,944 GB of memory. This machine series is optimized for compute and memory intensive, network bound ML training, and HPC workloads. The A3 machine series is available in A3 Ultra, A3 Mega, A3 High, and A3 Edge machine types.

VM instances created by using the A3 machine types provide the following features:

Feature A3 Ultra A3 Mega, High, Edge
GPU acceleration

NVIDIA H200 SXM GPUs attached, which offers 141 GB GPU memory per GPU and provides larger and faster memory for supporting large language models and HPC workloads.

NVIDIA H100 SXM GPUs attached, which offers 80 GB GPU memory per GPU and is ideal for large transformer-based language models, databases, and HPC.
Intel Xeon Scalable Processors

5th Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processor (Emerald Rapids) and offers up to 4.0 GHz sustained single-core max turbo frequency. For more information about this processor, see CPU platform.

4th Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processor (Sapphire Rapids) and offers up to 3.3 GHz sustained single-core max turbo frequency. For more information about this processor, see CPU platform.
Industry-leading NVLink scalability

NVIDIA H200 GPUs provide peak GPU NVLink bandwidth of 900 GB/s, unidirectionally.

With all-to-all NVLink topology between 8 GPUs in a system, the aggregate NVLink Bandwidth is up to 7.2 TB/s.

NVIDIA H100 GPUs provide peak GPU NVLink bandwidth of 450 GB/s, unidirectionally.

With all-to-all NVLink topology between 8 GPUs in a system, the aggregate NVLink Bandwidth is up to 7.2 TB/s.
Enhanced networking For this machine type, RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) increases the network performance by combining NVIDIA ConnectX-7 network interface cards (NICs) with our datacenter-wide four-way rail-aligned network. By leveraging RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE), the a3-ultragpu-8g machine type achieves much higher throughput between instances in a cluster when compared to other A3 machine types.
  • For the A3 Mega machine types, GPUDirect-TCPXO further improves on GPUDirect-TCPX by offloading TCP protocol. By leveraging GPUDirect-TCPXO, the a3-megagpu-8g machine type doubles the network bandwidth when compared to the A3 High and A3 Edge machine types.
  • For the A3 Edge and A3 High machine types, GPUDirect-TCPX increases the network performance by allowing data packet payloads to transfer directly from GPU memory to the network interface. By leveraging GPUDirect-TCPX, these machine type achieve much higher throughput between instances in a cluster when compared to the A2 or G2 accelerator-optimized machine types.
Improved networking speeds

Offers up to 4x networking speeds when compared to the previous generation A2 machine series.

For more information about networking, see Network bandwidths and GPUs.

Offers up to 2.5X networking speeds when compared to the previous generation A2 machine series.

For more information about networking, see Network bandwidths and GPUs.
Virtualization optimizations

The Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe) topology of A3 instances provides more accurate locality information that workloads can use to optimize data transfers.

The GPUs also expose Function Level Reset (FLR) for graceful recovery from failures and atomic operations support for concurrency improvements in certain scenarios.
Local SSD, Persistent Disk, and Hyperdisk support

Local SSD can be used for fast scratch disks or for feeding data into the GPUs while preventing I/O bottlenecks. Local SSD is attached as follows:

  • 12,000 GiB of Local SSD is automatically added to A3 Ultra instances.
  • 6,000 GiB of Local SSD is automatically added to A3 Mega, High, and Edge instances.

You can also attach up to 512 TiB of Persistent Disk and Hyperdisk to machine types in these series for applications that require higher storage performance. For select machine types, up to 257 TiB of Persistent Disk is also supported.
Compact placement policy support

Provides you with more control over the physical placement of your instances within data centers.

This enables lower-latency and higher bandwidth for instances that are located within a single availability zone.

For more information, see About compact placement policies.

A3 Ultra machine type

Machine type GPU count GPU memory*
(GB HBM3e)		 vCPU count† VM memory (GB) Attached Local SSD (GiB) Physical NIC count Maximum network bandwidth (Gbps)‡
a3-ultragpu-8g 8 1128 224 2,952 12,000 10 3,600

*GPU memory is the memory on a GPU device that can be used for temporary storage of data. It is separate from the VM's memory and is specifically designed to handle the higher bandwidth demands of your graphics-intensive workloads.
†A vCPU is implemented as a single hardware hyper-thread on one of the available CPU platforms.
‡Maximum egress bandwidth cannot exceed the number given. Actual egress bandwidth depends on the destination IP address and other factors. See Network bandwidth.

A3 Ultra limitations

  • You can only request capacity by using the supported provisioning options for an A3 Ultra machine type.
  • You don't receive sustained use discounts and flexible committed use discounts for VMs that use an A3 Ultra machine type.
  • You can only use an A3 Ultra machine type in certain regions and zones.
  • You can't use Persistent Disk (regional or zonal) on a VM that uses an A3 Ultra machine type.
  • The A3 Ultra machine type is only available on the Emerald Rapids CPU platform.
  • You can't change the machine type of an existing VM to an A3 Ultra machine type. You can only create new A3-ultra VMs. After creating a VM using an A3 Ultra machine type, you can't change the machine type.
  • A3 Ultra machine types don't support sole-tenancy.
  • You can't run Windows operating systems on an A3 Ultra machine type.

A3 Mega machine type

Machine type GPU count GPU memory*
(GB HBM3)		 vCPU count† VM memory (GB) Attached Local SSD (GiB) Physical NIC count Maximum network bandwidth (Gbps)‡
a3-megagpu-8g 8 640 208 1,872 6,000 9 1,800

*GPU memory is the memory on a GPU device that can be used for temporary storage of data. It is separate from the VM's memory and is specifically designed to handle the higher bandwidth demands of your graphics-intensive workloads.
†A vCPU is implemented as a single hardware hyper-thread on one of the available CPU platforms.
‡Maximum egress bandwidth cannot exceed the number given. Actual egress bandwidth depends on the destination IP address and other factors. See Network bandwidth.

A3 Mega limitations

A3 High machine type

Machine type GPU count GPU memory*
(GB HBM3)		 vCPU count† VM memory (GB) Attached Local SSD (GiB) Physical NIC count Maximum network bandwidth (Gbps)‡
a3-highgpu-1g 1 80 26 234 750 1 25
a3-highgpu-2g 2 160 52 468 1,500 1 50
a3-highgpu-4g 4 320 104 936 3,000 1 100
a3-highgpu-8g 8 640 208 1,872 6,000 5 1,000

*GPU memory is the memory on a GPU device that can be used for temporary storage of data. It is separate from the VM's memory and is specifically designed to handle the higher bandwidth demands of your graphics-intensive workloads.
†A vCPU is implemented as a single hardware hyper-thread on one of the available CPU platforms.
‡Maximum egress bandwidth cannot exceed the number given. Actual egress bandwidth depends on the destination IP address and other factors. See Network bandwidth.

A3 High limitations

  • You can only request capacity by using the supported provisioning options for an A3 High machine type.
  • You don't receive sustained use discounts and flexible committed use discounts for VMs that use an A3 High machine type.
  • You can only use an A3 High machine type in certain regions and zones.
  • You can't use regional Persistent Disk on a VM that uses an A3 High machine type.
  • The A3 High machine type is only available on the Sapphire Rapids CPU platform.
  • You can't change the machine type of an existing VM to an A3 High machine type. You can only create new A3-high VMs. After creating a VM using an A3 High machine type, you can't change the machine type.
  • A3 High machine types don't support sole-tenancy.
  • You can't run Windows operating systems on an A3 High machine type.
  • For a3-highgpu-1g, a3-highgpu-2g, anda3-highgpu-4g machine types, the following limitations apply:
    • For these machine types, you must create VMs using Spot VMs or a feature that uses the Dynamic Workload Scheduler (DWS), such as resize requests in a MIG. For detailed instructions on either of these options, review the following:
    • You can't use Hyperdisk Balanced with these machine types.
    • You can't create reservations.
    If you try to create a VM by using standard provisioning or try to create a reservation for these machine types, you'll receive an error message.

A3 Edge machine type

Machine type GPU count GPU memory*
(GB HBM3)		 vCPU count† VM memory (GB) Attached Local SSD (GiB) Physical NIC count Maximum network bandwidth (Gbps)‡
a3-edgegpu-8g 8 640 208 1,872 6,000 5
  • 800: for asia-south1 and northamerica-northeast2
  • 400: for all other A3 Edge regions

*GPU memory is the memory on a GPU device that can be used for temporary storage of data. It is separate from the VM's memory and is specifically designed to handle the higher bandwidth demands of your graphics-intensive workloads.
†A vCPU is implemented as a single hardware hyper-thread on one of the available CPU platforms.
‡Maximum egress bandwidth cannot exceed the number given. Actual egress bandwidth depends on the destination IP address and other factors. See Network bandwidth.

A3 Edge limitations

Supported disk types for the A3 series

A3 Ultra

A3 Ultra VMs can use the following block storage types:

  • Hyperdisk Balanced (hyperdisk-balanced): this is the only disk type that is supported for the boot disk
  • Hyperdisk Balanced High Availability (hyperdisk-balanced-high-availability)
  • Hyperdisk Extreme (hyperdisk-extreme)
  • Local SSD: which is automatically added to VMs that are created by using any of the A3 machine types
Maximum number of disks per VM*
Machine
types		 All disks† Hyperdisk Balanced Hyperdisk Balanced High Availability Hyperdisk Throughput Hyperdisk ML Hyperdisk Extreme Attached
Local SSD
disks
a3-ultragpu-8g 128 128 128 N/A N/A 8 32

*Hyperdisk usage is charged separately from machine type pricing. For disk pricing, see Hyperdisk pricing.
†This limit applies to Hyperdisk, but doesn't include Local SSD disks.

A3 Mega

A3 Mega VMs can use the following block storage types:

  • Balanced Persistent Disk (pd-balanced)
  • SSD (performance) Persistent Disk (pd-ssd)
  • Hyperdisk Balanced (hyperdisk-balanced)
  • Hyperdisk Balanced High Availability (hyperdisk-balanced-high-availability)
  • Hyperdisk ML (hyperdisk-ml)
  • Hyperdisk Extreme (hyperdisk-extreme)
  • Hyperdisk Throughput (hyperdisk-throughput)
  • Local SSD: which is automatically added to VMs that are created by using any of the A3 machine types
Maximum number of disks per VM*
Machine
types		 All disks† Hyperdisk Balanced Hyperdisk Balanced High Availability Hyperdisk Throughput Hyperdisk ML Hyperdisk Extreme Attached
Local SSD
disks
a3-megagpu-8g 128 32 32 64 64 8 16

*Hyperdisk and Persistent Disk usage are charged separately from machine type pricing. For disk pricing, see Persistent Disk and Hyperdisk pricing.
†This limit applies to Persistent Disk and Hyperdisk, but doesn't include Local SSD disks.

A3 High

A3 High VMs can use the following block storage types:

  • Balanced Persistent Disk (pd-balanced)
  • SSD (performance) Persistent Disk (pd-ssd)
  • Hyperdisk Balanced (hyperdisk-balanced): only supported for a3-highgpu-8g
  • Hyperdisk Balanced High Availability (hyperdisk-balanced-high-availability)
  • Hyperdisk ML (hyperdisk-ml)
  • Hyperdisk Extreme (hyperdisk-extreme)
  • Hyperdisk Throughput (hyperdisk-throughput)
  • Local SSD: which is automatically added to VMs that are created by using any of the A3 machine types
Maximum number of disks per VM*
Machine
types		 All disks† Hyperdisk Balanced Hyperdisk Balanced High Availability Hyperdisk Throughput Hyperdisk ML Hyperdisk Extreme Attached
Local SSD
disks
a3-highgpu-1g 128 N/A 32 64 64 N/A 2
a3-highgpu-2g 128 N/A 32 64 64 N/A 4
a3-highgpu-4g 128 N/A 32 64 64 8 8
a3-highgpu-8g 128 32 32 64 64 8 16

*Hyperdisk and Persistent Disk usage are charged separately from machine type pricing. For disk pricing, see Persistent Disk and Hyperdisk pricing.
†This limit applies to Persistent Disk and Hyperdisk, but doesn't include Local SSD disks.

A3 Edge

A3 Edge VMs can use the following block storage types:

  • Balanced Persistent Disk (pd-balanced)
  • SSD (performance) Persistent Disk (pd-ssd)
  • Hyperdisk Balanced (hyperdisk-balanced)
  • Hyperdisk Balanced High Availability (hyperdisk-balanced-high-availability)
  • Hyperdisk ML (hyperdisk-ml)
  • Hyperdisk Extreme (hyperdisk-extreme)
  • Hyperdisk Throughput (hyperdisk-throughput)
  • Local SSD: which is automatically added to VMs that are created by using any of the A3 machine types
Maximum number of disks per VM*
Machine types All disks† Hyperdisk Balanced Hyperdisk Balanced High Availability Hyperdisk Throughput Hyperdisk ML Hyperdisk Extreme Attached Local SSD
a3-edgegpu-8g 128 32 32 64 64 8 16

*Hyperdisk and Persistent Disk usage are charged separately from machine type pricing. For disk pricing, see Persistent Disk and Hyperdisk pricing.
†This limit applies to Persistent Disk and Hyperdisk, but doesn't include Local SSD disks.

Disk and capacity limits

If supported by the machine type, you can use a mixture of Hyperdisk and Persistent Disk volumes on a VM, but the following restrictions apply:

  • The combined number of both Hyperdisk and Persistent Disk volumes can't exceed 128 per VM.

  • The maximum total disk capacity (in TiB) across all disk types can't exceed:

    • For machine types with less than 32 vCPUs:

      • 257 TiB for all Hyperdisk or all Persistent Disk
      • 257 TiB for a mixture of Hyperdisk and Persistent Disk

    • For machine types with 32 or more vCPUs:

      • 512 TiB for all Hyperdisk
      • 512 TiB for a mixture of Hyperdisk and Persistent Disk
      • 257 TiB for all Persistent Disk

For details about the capacity limits, see Hyperdisk size and attachment limits and Persistent Disk maximum capacity.

The A2 machine series

The A2 machine series is available in A2 Standard and A2 Ultra machine types. These machine types have 12 to 96 vCPUs, and up to 1,360 GB of memory.

VM instances created by using the A2 machine types provide the following features:

  • GPU acceleration: each A2 instance has NVIDIA A100 GPUs. These are available in both A100 40GB and A100 80GB options.

  • Industry-leading NVLink scale that provides peak GPU to GPU NVLink bandwidth of 600 GBps. For example, systems with 16 GPUs have an aggregate NVLink bandwidth of up to 9.6 TBps. These 16 GPUs can be used as a single high performance accelerator with unified memory space to deliver up to 10 petaFLOPS of compute power and up to 20 petaFLOPS of inference compute power that can be used for artificial intelligence, deep learning, and machine learning workloads.

  • Improved computing speeds: the attached NVIDIA A100 GPUs offer up to 10x improvements in computing speed when compared to previous generation NVIDIA V100 GPUs.

    With the A2 machine series, you can get up to 100 Gbps network bandwidth.

  • Local SSD, Persistent Disk, and Hyperdisk support: for fast scratch disks or for feeding data into the GPUs while preventing I/O bottlenecks, the A2 machine types support Local SSD as follows:

    • For the A2 Standard machine types, you can add up to 3,000 GiB of Local SSD when you create an instance.
    • For the A2 Ultra machine types, Local SSD is automatically attached when you create an instance.

    For applications that require higher storage performance, you can also attach up to 257 TiB of Persistent Disk and 512 TiB of Hyperdisk volumes to A2 instances.

  • Compact placement policy support: provides you with more control over the physical placement of your instances within data centers. This enables lower-latency and higher bandwidth for instances that are located within a single availability zone. For more information, see Reduce latency by using compact placement policies.

The following machine types are available for the A2 machine series.

A2 Ultra machine types

These machine types have a fixed number of A100 80GB GPUs. Local SSD is automatically attached to instances created by using the A2 Ultra machine types.

Machine type GPU count GPU memory*
(GB HBM3)		 vCPU count† VM memory (GB) Attached Local SSD (GiB) Maximum network bandwidth (Gbps)‡
a2-ultragpu-1g 1 80 12 170 375 24
a2-ultragpu-2g 2 160 24 340 750 32
a2-ultragpu-4g 4 320 48 680 1,500 50
a2-ultragpu-8g 8 640 96 1,360 3,000 100

*GPU memory is the memory on a GPU device that can be used for temporary storage of data. It is separate from the instance's memory and is specifically designed to handle the higher bandwidth demands of your graphics-intensive workloads.
†A vCPU is implemented as a single hardware hyper-thread on one of the available CPU platforms.
‡Maximum egress bandwidth cannot exceed the number given. Actual egress bandwidth depends on the destination IP address and other factors. See Network bandwidth.

A2 Ultra limitations

  • You can only request capacity by using the supported provisioning options for an A2 Ultra machine type.
  • You don't receive sustained use discounts and flexible committed use discounts for VMs that use an A2 Ultra machine type.
  • You can only use an A2 Ultra machine type in certain regions and zones.
  • The A2 Ultra machine type is only available on the Cascade Lake platform.
  • If your VM uses an A2 Ultra machine type, you can't change the machine type. If you need to use a different A2 Ultra machine type, or any other machine type, you must create a new VM.
  • You can't change any other machine type to an A2 Ultra machine type. If you need a VM that uses an A2 Ultra machine type, you must create a new VM.
  • You can't do a quick format of the attached Local SSDs on Windows VMs that use A2 Ultra machine types. To format these Local SSDs, you must do a full format by using the diskpart utility and specifying format fs=ntfs label=tmpfs.

A2 Standard machine types

These machine types have a fixed number of A100 40GB GPUs.

Machine type GPU count GPU memory*
(GB HBM3)		 vCPU count† VM memory (GB) Attached Local SSD (GiB) Maximum network bandwidth (Gbps)‡
a2-highgpu-1g 1 40 12 85 Yes 24
a2-highgpu-2g 2 80 24 170 Yes 32
a2-highgpu-4g 4 160 48 340 Yes 50
a2-highgpu-8g 8 320 96 680 Yes 100
a2-megagpu-16g 16 640 96 1,360 Yes 100

*GPU memory is the memory on a GPU device that can be used for temporary storage of data. It is separate from the instance's memory and is specifically designed to handle the higher bandwidth demands of your graphics-intensive workloads.
†A vCPU is implemented as a single hardware hyper-thread on one of the available CPU platforms.
‡Maximum egress bandwidth cannot exceed the number given. Actual egress bandwidth depends on the destination IP address and other factors. See Network bandwidth.

A2 Standard limitations

  • You can only request capacity by using the supported provisioning options for an A2 Standard machine type.
  • You don't receive sustained use discounts and flexible committed use discounts for VMs that use an A2 Standard machine type.
  • You can only use an A2 Standard machine type in certain regions and zones.
  • The A2 Standard machine type is only available on the Cascade Lake platform.
  • If your VM uses an A2 Standard machine type, you can only switch from one A2 Standard machine type to another A2 Standard machine type. You can't change to any other machine type. For more information, see Modify accelerator-optmized VMs.
  • You can't use the Windows operating system with A2 Standard machine types. When using Windows operating systems, choose a different A2 Standard machine type.
  • You can't do a quick format of the attached Local SSDs on Windows VMs that use A2 Standard machine types. To format these Local SSDs, you must do a full format by using the diskpart utility and specifying format fs=ntfs label=tmpfs.
  • A2 Standard machine types don't support sole-tenancy.

Supported disk types for the A2 series

A2 instances can use the following block storage types:

  • Hyperdisk ML (hyperdisk-ml)
  • Balanced Persistent Disk (pd-balanced)
  • SSD (performance) Persistent Disk (pd-ssd)
  • Standard Persistent Disk (pd-standard)
  • Local SSD: which is automatically attached to instances created by using the A2 Ultra machine types.

If supported by the machine type, you can use a mixture of Hyperdisk and Persistent Disk volumes on a VM, but the following restrictions apply:

  • The combined number of both Hyperdisk and Persistent Disk volumes can't exceed 128 per VM.

  • The maximum total disk capacity (in TiB) across all disk types can't exceed:

    • For machine types with less than 32 vCPUs:

      • 257 TiB for all Hyperdisk or all Persistent Disk
      • 257 TiB for a mixture of Hyperdisk and Persistent Disk

    • For machine types with 32 or more vCPUs:

      • 512 TiB for all Hyperdisk
      • 512 TiB for a mixture of Hyperdisk and Persistent Disk
      • 257 TiB for all Persistent Disk

For details about the capacity limits, see Hyperdisk size and attachment limits and Persistent Disk maximum capacity.

The G2 machine series

The G2 machine series is available in standard machine types that have 4 to 96 vCPUs, and up to 432 GB of memory. This machine series is optimized for inference and graphics workloads. The G2 machine series is available in a single standard machine type with multiple configurations.

VM instances created by using the G2 machine types provide the following features:

  • GPU acceleration: each G2 machine type has NVIDIA L4 GPUs.

  • Improved inference rates: the G2 machine type provides support for the FP8 (8-bit floating point) data type which speeds up ML inference rates and reduces memory requirements.

  • Next generation graphics performance: NVIDIA L4 GPUs provide up to 3X improvement in graphics performance by using third-generation RT cores and NVIDIA DLSS 3 (Deep Learning Super Sampling) technology.

  • High performance network bandwidth: with the G2 machine types, you can get up to 100 Gbps network bandwidth.

  • Local SSD, Persistent Disk, and Hyperdisk support: you can add up to 3,000 GiB of Local SSD to G2 instances. This can be used for fast scratch disks or for feeding data into the GPUs while preventing I/O bottlenecks.

    You can also attach Hyperdisk and Persistent Disk volumes to G2 instances, for applications that require more persistent storage. The maximum storage capacity depends on the number of vCPUs the VM has. For details, see Supported disk types.

  • Compact placement policy support: provides you with more control over the physical placement of your instances within data centers. This enables lower-latency and higher bandwidth for instances that are located within a single availability zone. For more information, see Reduce latency by using compact placement policies.

G2 machine types

Each G2 machine type has a fixed number of NVIDIA L4 GPUs and vCPUs attached. Each G2 machine type also has a default memory and a custom memory range. The custom memory range defines the amount of memory that you can allocate to your VM for each machine type. You can specify your custom memory during VM creation.

Machine type GPU count GPU memory* (GB GDDR6) vCPU count† Default VM memory (GB) Custom VM memory range (GB) Max Local SSD supported (GiB) Maximum network bandwidth (Gbps)‡
g2-standard-4 1 24 4 16 16 to 32 375 10
g2-standard-8 1 24 8 32 32 to 54 375 16
g2-standard-12 1 24 12 48 48 to 54 375 16
g2-standard-16 1 24 16 64 54 to 64 375 32
g2-standard-24 2 48 24 96 96 to 108 750 32
g2-standard-32 1 24 32 128 96 to 128 375 32
g2-standard-48 4 96 48 192 192 to 216 1,500 50
g2-standard-96 8 192 96 384 384 to 432 3,000 100

*GPU memory is the memory on a GPU device that can be used for temporary storage of data. It is separate from the VM's memory and is specifically designed to handle the higher bandwidth demands of your graphics-intensive workloads.
†A vCPU is implemented as a single hardware hyper-thread on one of the available CPU platforms.
‡Maximum egress bandwidth cannot exceed the number given. Actual egress bandwidth depends on the destination IP address and other factors. See Network bandwidth.

G2 limitations

  • You can only request capacity by using the supported provisioning options for an G2 machine type.
  • You don't receive sustained use discounts and flexible committed use discounts for VMs that use an G2 machine type.
  • You can only use an G2 machine type in certain regions and zones.
  • The G2 machine type is only available on the Cascade Lake platform.
  • Standard Persistent Disk (pd-standard) is not supported on VMs that use G2 standard machine types. For supported disk types, see Supported disk types for G2.
  • You can't create Multi-Instance GPUs on G2 machine types.
  • If you need to change the machine type of a G2 VM, review Modify accelerator-optmized VMs.
  • You can't use Deep Learning VM Images as boot disks for your VMs that use G2 machine types.
  • The current default driver for Container-Optimized OS doesn't support L4 GPUs running on G2 machine types. Container-Optimized OS also only support a select set of drivers. If you want to use Container-Optimized OS on G2 machine types, review the following notes:
    • Use a Container-Optimized OS version that supports the minimum recommended NVIDIA driver version 525.60.13 or later. For more information, review the Container-Optimized OS release notes.
    • When you install the driver, specify the latest available version that works for the L4 GPUs. For example, sudo cos-extensions install gpu -- -version=525.60.13.
  • You must use the Google Cloud CLI or REST to create G2 VMs for the following scenarios:
    • You want to specify custom memory values.
    • You want to customize the number of visible CPU cores.

Supported disk types for G2 series

G2 instances can use the following block storage types:

  • Balanced Persistent Disk (pd-balanced)
  • SSD (performance) Persistent Disk (pd-ssd)
  • Hyperdisk ML (hyperdisk-ml)
  • Hyperdisk Throughput (hyperdisk-throughput)
  • Local SSD

If supported by the machine type, you can use a mixture of Hyperdisk and Persistent Disk volumes on a VM, but the following restrictions apply:

  • The combined number of both Hyperdisk and Persistent Disk volumes can't exceed 128 per VM.

  • The maximum total disk capacity (in TiB) across all disk types can't exceed:

    • For machine types with less than 32 vCPUs:

      • 257 TiB for all Hyperdisk or all Persistent Disk
      • 257 TiB for a mixture of Hyperdisk and Persistent Disk

    • For machine types with 32 or more vCPUs:

      • 512 TiB for all Hyperdisk
      • 512 TiB for a mixture of Hyperdisk and Persistent Disk
      • 257 TiB for all Persistent Disk

For details about the capacity limits, see Hyperdisk size and attachment limits and Persistent Disk maximum capacity.

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