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!
