Google Cloud's Darren Mowry on startups consuming AI credits faster than ever and sticky infrastructure

Darren Mowry, Managing Director for Global Startups at Google Cloud, spoke at the company's first Global AI Builders Summit in Mountain View, an event drawing several hundred founders in person and tens of thousands digitally. Featured customers on stage included Lovable, Replit, and Fireworks.

Mowry's core observation is that AI has fundamentally changed what startups actually do with cloud credits. In the old model, credits were a commoditized incentive — a startup could burn AWS credits, then Azure credits, then Google credits, hopping between virtual machines with minimal friction or switching cost. That arbitrage no longer works the way it did.

“Over the last 18 months, we've definitely felt what I think we'd really call like a seismic shift. In the last 18 months, not only do we have more startups than ever in the program, they're consuming the credits extremely quickly. And more importantly, they're staying with us — this concept of I'm going to jump from one platform to another to use credits worked in a commoditized cloud world. Now that I'm able to come to these startups with GPU, TPU, Gemini, Claude, Sonnet, Llama, agents wrapped in Google Cloud, we're finding these startups are using the credits but then they're like 'I'm not going anywhere.'”

Over the past 18 months, Google Cloud for Startups has seen more participants than at any point in Mowry's five years at the company, and those startups are consuming credits faster than ever. More importantly, they're not leaving. Mowry attributes the stickiness to the integrated depth of what's now on offer: TPUs, GPUs, Gemini, Claude, Llama, and agentic tooling — including an SDK and ADK for building and publishing agents — all within a single stack. When infrastructure, models, and agentic capabilities are tightly bundled, the calculus of switching changes. Startups that came for the credits stay because rebuilding on a different platform would mean unpicking the entire stack.

On agents specifically, Mowry pushes back on any perception that Google Cloud's agent offering is roadmap vapor. He says founder feedback consistently describes the agent capability as production-ready today, not a planned future release.

He also flags Gemma Nano as a recent release out of DeepMind, with further model and agent announcements expected shortly.