Google 'flexing AI muscle' at Cloud Next with partnerships, updates: analysts
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Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL) kicked off its annual Cloud Next conference yesterday, unveiling several new partnerships, new chips and new artificial intelligence tools, the majority of which impressed several Wall Street analysts. 
KeyBanc Capital Markets analyst Justin Patterson, who has an overweight rating and $145 price target on Google (GOOG) (GOOGL), said the event highlighted his comfort with the company's cloud unit relative to competitors and could help boost the valuation of the company.
"We view Google Cloud as sustaining mid-20% [year-over-year] growth through 2025 through strength of the AI product cycle," Patterson wrote in an investor note. "As Cloud revenue and profitability ramp, we see Cloud bolstering valuation." 
Patterson added that there were several key announcements, including infrastructure updates, like the new Cloud TPU v5e, the availability of its A3 virtualization machines - which are based on Nvidia's (NVDA) H100 GPUs - and its multi-cluster GKE Enterprise.
Additionally, the company made several artificial intelligence announcements, including updates to Vertex AI and Duet AI.
Bank of America analyst Justin Post, who has a buy rating and $146 price target on Google (GOOG) (GOOGL), pointed out that the many partnerships and new artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities were among the highlights. 
"We believe the event will help to reduce remaining overhangs on Google Cloud AI capabilities ... as Google Cloud is integrating a variety of LLM models and [natural language processing] capabilities," Post explained.
Google (GOOG) (GOOGL) shares were slightly higher in pre-market trading on Wednesday.

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