Cloud computing is «for everyone», Google Cloud CEO Diane Green said at the company’s Next event at London’s ExCel on Wednesday, but not everyone knows it.

Highlighting this point, the CEO told an anecdote from the night before. Green met a man, whose company is using Google Cloud to migrate their IT systems, but also didn’t seem to realise who she was.

«My favourite interaction was last night, I was checking into my hotel and someone, I hope is in the audience, asked me if I was here to go to Google Cloud Next,» she said with a wry smile. «I said yeah, I am.»

It’s a strange paradox to be the boss of a company delivering a game-changing technology for a business and yet that business has no idea who you are. Unlike its parent company, Google Search which celebrated its 20th anniversary recently, Google Cloud is only ten years old and, as yet, hasn’t reached the same iconic status.

«It is interesting because we are early in the cloud,» said Green. «Just 10% of workloads have moved to the cloud, but it is really clear that it is this major vehicle for digital transformation and that is where so much of our companies are going to digitally transform themselves.»

This, Green said, was Google’s new mission; to deliver its technology to millions of companies, any size, and take their data, organise it, manage it and make it useful and assessable to them in driving their business.

The company has laid a lot of groundwork, infrastructure and new services in Europe, particularly in London, where Green noted Google has been investing heavily in.

«Some of the investments we’ve made in the last 18-months include five new cloud regions in London, Germany, the Netherlands, Finland and we’ve also just announced one in Zurich,» said Green. 

«We have some of our best people here in Europe. We have DeepMind in London and they just announced another lab opening in Paris. Google Brain has a lab in Paris, Google Cloud AI has a large group in Munich, where we are doing applied AI and also some interesting robotics work and in Dublin, we have our Advanced Solutions Lab (ASL), where customers can come in and get deep immersive training in machine learning.»

The range of digital transformations Google Cloud is offering can be seen in the diverse partnerships it has forged with companies such as AirAsia or transport services such as Airbus and German software company SAP, who Green said was a big partner.

Perhaps most unusual, is the company’s partnership with the Zoological Society London (ZSL) which is using Google Cloud image API’s to provide surveillance over wildlife to help with conservation. This nod to the environment is also seen in the company’s regional data centres that Green said made Google Cloud Unique.

«Another differentiator that Google Cloud has, that is good for everybody in the world, Google Cloud runs all of its 17 plus region’s data centres, carbon neutral,» she said.

Huawei is to begin selling servers powered by its own processors, which will see it move away from Intel CPUs. 

According to a Reuters report, the processors are made by Huawei’s semiconductor company Hisilicon. These chips are featured in some of its smartphones and telecommunications equipment.

Currently, Huawei sells servers powered by Intel processors to telecoms and cloud companies. Huawei has not divulged how many of its servers will make use of its own chips.

The report said that Huawei will be using the 7nm-based Ascend 910 chipset; the firm claims this is twice as powerful as competitor Nvidia’s v100. The Ascend 910 chipset will be available summer next year.

The chips won’t be on offer to third parties, according to the firm’s rotating chairman Eric Xu, speaking at the company’s annual global partners’ conference, Huawei Connect.

“Since we do not sell to third parties, there is no direct competition between Huawei and chip vendors,” Xu said on Wednesday, in response to questions about competition from Qualcomm, AMD and Nvidia. “We provide hardware and cloud computing service.”

In addition to Ascend 910, there is also the Ascend 310, a chip for smart devices. Both chipsets are aimed at artificial intelligence applications. The Ascend 910 is focused on datacentre usage. Huawei said the chip can not only process data faster than competitors but would train machine learning models in minutes. The Ascend 310 is aimed at not only smart devices, but also Internet of Things devices using artificial intelligence.

«Going forward we need to think of new ways to prepare our business and industry for change. There are clear signs that AI will change or disrupt a whole host of industries,” said Xu.

The firm unveiled its first chip in 2017 Kirin 970. In 2018 it introduced another AI chip Kirin 980 which is expected to be featured in the upcoming Mate 20 flagship handset.

Google has decided to drop out of the bidding for the Pentagon’s $10 billion, 10-year cloud computing project because it may conflict with its «corporate values».

The Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud involves the migration of defence department data to a commercially operated cloud system. Bids for the work are due on 12 October.

«We are not bidding on the JEDI contract because first, we couldn’t be assured that it would align with our AI Principles,» a Google spokesman said in a statement. «And second, we determined that there were portions of the contract that were out of scope with our current government certifications.»

The JEDI contract opportunity attracted interest from many of the big cloud firms. However, there was discontent that there could only be one contract winner, with industry players stating their preference would have been for multiple providers to bid for and win the work.

It would seem that Google felt the same about how the contract should have been apportioned, with the spokesperson adding: «Had the JEDI contract been open to multiple vendors, we would have submitted a compelling solution for portions of it. Google Cloud believes that a multi-cloud approach is in the best interest of government agencies because it allows them to choose the right cloud for the right workload.»

The tech giant’s decision not to bid for the work follows fairly swiftly on the heels of news that it would not be renewing its contract with the Pentagon’s AI weapons programme, Project Maven – a project its employees protested heavily about. Tweets by the Tech Workers Coalition regarding this latest move hint at similar discontent among employees.

The company then released a set of principles which would asses its AI applications against a host of objectives, saying it believes any use of its technology should be socially beneficial, accountable, and incorporate privacy-by-design, and adhere to ethical standards.

Google is shutting down Google Plus after it not only failed to gain traction with people happier with the likes of Facebook and Twitter, but also because it discovered a massive data leak affecting up to half a million users.

In a blog post, Google said that after a major security review, dubbed Project Strobe, the social networking service would close. The review found a sizable flaw in Google Plus APIs that meant malicious apps could extract data such as the name, email address, occupation, gender, and age from a person’s profile.

“It does not include any other data you may have posted or connected to Google+ or any other service, like Google+ posts, messages, Google account data, phone numbers or G Suite content,” said Ben Smith, Google Fellow and vice president of engineering.

Smith said that “the Profiles of up to 500,000 Google+ accounts were potentially affected.” However, Smith added that the API’s log data is only kept for only two weeks and analysis showed that up to 438 applications may have used this API.

“We found no evidence that any developer was aware of this bug, or abusing the API, and we found no evidence that any Profile data was misused,” Smith said. 

Google’s Privacy & Data Protection Office reviewed this issue to look at the type of data involved to see if the firm could accurately identify the users to inform, whether there was any evidence of misuse, and whether there were any actions a developer or user could take in response, according to Smith.  “None of these thresholds were met in this instance,” he said.

Smith said that despite Google’s engineering teams putting in a lot of effort, “it has not achieved broad consumer or developer adoption, and has seen limited user interaction with apps. The consumer version of Google+ currently has low usage and engagement: 90 percent of Google+ user sessions are less than five seconds.”

Google Plus will come to an end for consumers next August, but business users will still be able to use the service as an internal corporate social network.

The firm has also promised to institute new security rules, including limits around the types of use cases that are permitted to access consumer Gmail data.

“Only apps directly enhancing email functionality – such as email clients, email backup services and productivity services (e.g., CRM and mail merge services)—will be authorised to access this data,” Smith added.

Google will also remove access to contact interaction data from the Android Contacts API within the next few months. In addition, Google Account permissions dialog boxes will be spilt to show each requested permission, one at a time, within its own dialog box.