Google Cloud bets big on AI agents with Gemini Enterprise platform and new chips

Google Cloud Pushes Hard on AI Agents and Hardcore Computing

Google is going all-in on agentic AI. At Google's Cloud Next conference on Wednesday, the tech giant announced a slew of updates aimed at helping its enterprise customers automate their business processes with AI agents. Google Cloud reports that 75% of its customers use AI in their businesses, but given how inescapable AI has become in Google products like Docs, Sheets and Gmail, that high figure isn't surprising. But Google is still doubling down, writing in a blog post that it's chasing the idea of the "agentic enterprise." Agentic AI is the tech that runs agents, or bots, that can autonomously complete tasks, with little human babysitting needed. It's transforming AI, particularly for coding and workplace tasks. Tech companies have embraced agents this year, placing big bets that tools like OpenClaw, Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex will fulfill AI's promise of automating big swaths of tasks. Now, Google is giving its business tech the same agentic makeover. Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian told reporters that agentic AI is where the company sees AI tech going in the future. The company focused this year's updates on making sure customers have AI processes that are secure, connected to internal systems and "optimize performance, scale and cost of how agents run," he said. The Gemini enterprise agent platform is the new, behind-the-scenes tech that businesses can use to oversee all their AI agents. Employees can create and use agents through the Gemini enterprise app, which includes a new agent designer that can be used to schedule tasks to run across different applications. Google is also announcing two new, eighth-generation TPUs, the 8T and 8I. These are not your mother's computer processors; they're advanced chips solely meant for tech companies doing heavy-compute tasks, like developing AI. The 8T chip is meant to make training more efficient, with Google saying it has three times the processing power compared with Google's seventh-gen Ironwood. The 8I is specifically for inference. Google says it has an 80% improvement in the amount of memory you get with SRAM, and it has about 11,152 chips in a single system.

Google Releases New AI Agents to Challenge OpenAI and Anthropic

Alphabet Inc.'s Google unveiled a slew of tools to build AI agents aimed at helping companies automate tasks in the tech giant's latest attempt to take on OpenAI and Anthropic PBC in the burgeoning market. At an annual conference in Las Vegas, Google's cloud computing unit on Wednesday showcased a set of tools that can create AI agents and track their work within companies, including a dedicated inbox for the virtual bots to post information and progress reports. Google also introduced updates across its Workspace productivity suite and offered up a vision in which AI agents dramatically overhaul the day to day routines of the average worker. The company's researchers invented much of the technology that touched off the current AI boom, but now Google is in a tight race with leading AI agent makers to win business from corporate customers clamoring for the technology to boost productivity. With the company pouring as much as $185 billion into capital expenditure this year alone, investors are hoping that it can drum up enough new business to justify the steep investment in AI. Get the Morning & Evening Briefing Americas newsletters. Get the Morning & Evening Briefing Americas newsletters. Get the Morning & Evening Briefing Americas newsletters. Start every morning with what you need to know followed by context and analysis on news of the day each evening. Plus, Bloomberg Weekend. Start every morning with what you need to know followed by context and analysis on news of the day each evening. Plus, Bloomberg Weekend. Start every morning with what you need to know followed by context and analysis on news of the day each evening. Plus, Bloomberg Weekend. Plus Signed UpPlus Sign UpPlus Sign Up By continuing, I agree to the Privacy Policy and Terms of Service. The search giant is hoping that its combination of chips, AI models and developer tools will give it an edge. It's poised to announce a new generation of custom-designed chips, including one dedicated to inference, or running AI models after they've been trained. With this push, Google will further challenge market leader Nvidia Corp. in a fast-growing category for semiconductors that's fueled by surging adoption of AI software. "This isn't about offering individual services that can be cobbled together; it is about providing a comprehensive backbone for innovation," Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said in a blog post. A particular focus for Google is AI coding, a market where company leaders are growing increasingly worried that they have fallen behind. Many engineers in Silicon Valley toggle between Anthropic's Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex to see which program will give them the best results, but Google often isn't in the conversation, startup founders told Bloomberg News. In a bid to court developers, Google said its Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform would include new features such as Memory Bank and Memory Profile to help agents to remember past interactions with users, a weakness of some early AI tools. Another new feature, Agent Simulation, will help developers more thoroughly test how the tools work before launch. Anthropic has begun to turn its attention to workers in other sectors with its Cowork product, and Google is chasing that business too. Google said workers could use its Gemini Enterprise app, which it framed as the "front door for AI for every employee," to create agents without writing a line of code. The company also announced Projects, a collaboration platform designed for workers to collaborate with their colleagues as well as agents. Google said the tool brings together information from sources such as Workspace, Microsoft Corp.'s OneDrive and company chats to help agents operate with the proper context. Other offerings by the company are intended to help clients make sure that agents can operate in fields with compliance issues. Google also unveiled new cybersecurity agents that it said clients could use to protect their systems. AI models are identifying a torrent of bugs, but questions are mounting about how they could be exploited without proper safeguards.

Google banks on AI edge to catch up to cloud rivals Amazon and Microsoft

Google's cloud boss says that a pair of new chips and rapid advances at its DeepMind AI lab will help it close the gap with Microsoft and Amazon in the fiercely competitive cloud computing market. Thomas Kurian said that after a slow start in AI and entering the cloud business late, Google's "full-stack" AI strategy -- which includes building chips, data centres, foundation models and products in-house -- was starting to pay off. "We're not just a hyperscaler reselling other people's technology. Our differentiation comes down to the fact that we own the IP, the model and the chips are ours," Kurian said in an interview. "For every dollar of revenue, we're not shipping 80 per cent of it to either a model or chip provider, which allows us to invest more," he added. Eight years after joining Alphabet from Oracle, Kurian has grown its cloud market share from 7 to 14 per cent -- cementing his position as a contender to be Google's next leader. But Google Cloud remains a distant third to Amazon Web Services and Microsoft's Azure in the $418bn cloud-computing market. Alphabet has also been criticised for allowing OpenAI and Anthropic's chatbots and coding assistants to leapfrog its own AI products. AI is now helping Google Cloud to grow faster than its rivals; it reported a 48 per cent jump in revenue in the final quarter of 2025 and is on track to generate more than $70bn this year, up from $43bn in 2024. Google believes its TPUs and Gemini models are far ahead of Amazon's Trainium chips and Nova AI system as well as Microsoft's Maia processors and MAI models. This makes the search giant less dependent on partnerships with Anthropic and OpenAI or on Nvidia's expensive GPU chips. Kurian said that Google's 12-year investment in DeepMind allowed it to continually improve its proprietary chips and deliver consumer and enterprise AI products at a lower cost with better margins. Google unveiled two new chips this week at a splashy event in Las Vegas, the eighth generation of its TPUs, or Tensor Processing Units. One specialises in training AI models, while the other has more memory to run AI systems faster, known as inference. "You need a large lab in-house to really build an amazing chip [and] I don't think the other players are building their own models, of any quality at least," Kurian said. Only Nvidia currently rivalled Google's combination of AI hardware and integrated chip software, he added. Google's emergence as a competitor to Nvidia has strained the relationship between the two companies, even as Alphabet remains one of its biggest GPU customers. A report from Epoch AI estimates that Google controls about a quarter of global AI computing power, about 3.8mn TPUs and 1.3mn GPUs. Microsoft is second with 3.2mn Nvidia GPUs. In a recent podcast, Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang criticised Google for not submitting its AI chips to independent tests and cast doubt on their performance and efficiency claims. He added that "100 per cent" of demand came from Anthropic and without the start-up "why would there be any TPU growth at all?" Kurian responded that nine of the top 10 AI labs used TPUs, including ex-OpenAI executive Mira Murati's Thinking Machines. OpenAI cannot because of an exclusivity deal with Microsoft. "They have a choice of what to buy. If we were not competitive in performance, in price, in quality, they would choose not to do so," he said. Anthropic on Friday struck a deal under which it will buy more of Google's chips. Google agreed to invest up to $40bn in the start-up and provide 5GW of computing capacity over five years, worth more than $200bn. Google is also spending heavily on its in-house AI efforts, with capital expenditures forecast to rise to $185bn this year. Kurian argues the vast sums are justified by customer demand and strong revenues. He said OpenAI and Anthropic face a more difficult financial path, which could also imperil Big Tech groups that rely on them. Both start-ups are losing tens of billions a year as they race to secure computing power to train and run their models. "Those AI providers depend on private capital markets, which are reaching a saturation point," he added. "If you're going to go public, you can't be lossmaking forever. And if you stay private, you cannot raise venture money forever." This year OpenAI and Anthropic raised more than $150bn in two of the largest private fundraisings in history as they prepared for IPOs. Dozens more start-ups have raised multibillion-dollar sums. "Over the next year to two you will see some shakeout in the market," Kurian said. Whether "particular providers are going to make it or not largely comes down to the economics".

Google puts AI agents at heart of its enterprise money-making push

LAS VEGAS, April 22 (Reuters) - Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai is deepening a push into enterprise software, signaling to investors at Google's annual cloud conference that AI agents -- human-like digital assistants -- are a lynchpin of its strategy to monetize artificial intelligence. At the three-day conference in Las Vegas that starts Wednesday, Pichai and key Google executives will seek to position the company's AI tools as production-ready infrastructure for enterprise customers who are emerging as the industry's most reliable revenue stream. Other top AI companies including OpenAI and Anthropic have aggressively shifted resources to business customers in recent months. Mountain View, California-based Google announced on Wednesday that it was unifying a set of AI products under the name "Gemini Enterprise." Most notably, this involves rebranding and bulking up Vertex AI, a tool that allows cloud customers to select from a variety of AI models to use for ⁠business purposes. Google also announced a set of new governance and security features for AI agents. Agents are powerful digital assistants that can plan, decide, and act autonomously, a fast-growing field that has sparked worries over safety, reliability and oversight. "There's definitely a strategic shift as the models become much more sophisticated," Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian told Reuters in an interview. The primary use case of Vertex AI recently shifted from "old-style machine learning" to a sudden explosion in users building their own custom AI agents, Kurian said. Google is seeking to outflank both its traditional cloud rivals and AI upstarts as pressure mounts to prove returns on massive generative AI spending. Google Cloud, once seen as a laggard to rivals such as Amazon (AMZN.O), opens new tab and Microsoft (MSFT.O), opens new tab, has gained traction with enterprise customers, powered by massive bets on AI and years of heavy investment in data centers, custom chips, and networking gear. At GE Appliances, that shift is already tangible. Marcia Brey, a senior executive and Google customer, told Reuters ⁠that Google's suite of tools and the enterprise data already stored in Google Cloud allowed her logistics and distribution team to deploy AI faster compared to other products the company had tested. AGENTS OVER CODING In addition to traditional enterprise providers and other hyperscalers, a new class of competitors are quickly emerging in enterprise AI: model providers. So far, coding assistants and plug-ins that connect AI models to existing enterprise software have emerged as lucrative channels for AI revenue and payback on their heavy investments. After early success powered by the raw strength of ⁠their models, OpenAI and Anthropic are now pushing downstream, marshalling resources into applications that utilize those models to perform specialized tasks, including agent-building tools. But while rivals are pushing hard on their coding products, Google, by contrast, kept coding largely out of the spotlight at its cloud conference. Kurian instead cast the AI battleground as one defined by agents, governance ⁠and enterprise deployment, saying that some coding announcements were being held back for its I/O developer conference in May. "Some people are using the models to write code. They can use Gemini and also other tools like Claude," he said. "But in other cases, we have unique things. There's capability in the platform that nobody ⁠else offers." The long-term bet to build out a vast suite of in-house offerings, from models to chips, rather than relying on third-party vendors has given Google an edge over other large cloud providers. This has helped Google to grow its overall cloud market share to 14% at the end of 2025, though it still trails rivals Amazon (AMZN.O), opens new tab and Microsoft, according to data from Synergy Research. Reporting by Kenrick Cai; Editing by Sayantani Ghosh and Shri Navaratnam Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab * Suggested Topics: * Artificial Intelligence Kenrick Cai Thomson Reuters Kenrick Cai is a correspondent for Reuters based in San Francisco. He covers Google, its parent company Alphabet and artificial intelligence. Cai joined Reuters in 2024. He previously worked at Forbes magazine, where he was a staff writer covering venture capital and startups. He received a Best in Business award from the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing in 2023. He is a graduate of Duke University.

Google unifies Gemini Enterprise, debuts new chips

Why it matters: Google is in a pitched battle with Amazon and Microsoft to be the cloud provider of choice for AI workloads. Driving the news: Google announced its eighth-generation Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), which will come in two flavors -- one for training new models and the other for near-real-time answers to user queries. * Google also announced its Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, incorporating what had been Vertex AI (including access to Gemini and third-party models), plus new security, governance and orchestration features. * It's pitching Gemini Enterprise as more ready for the needs of large businesses than Anthropic's Cowork and other agentic software. * The announcements came as the company kicks off its Cloud Next conference in Las Vegas. The big picture: Most of the major AI players are either already creating their own chips or standing up efforts to do so, with Google and Amazon several generations in.

AI race intensifies with Google's new agent management platform

The company also launched the latest iteration of its TPUs. Google made a series of new launches to woo businesses, including a new platform to build and manage AI agents, and the latest generation of its AI-specific Tensor Processing Units (TPU), as competition between tech giants targeting the lucrative enterprise sector continues to intensify. The announcements were made at the company's annual Cloud Next conference in Las Vegas yesterday (22 April), with around 32,000 in attendance. There is no shortage of companies offering agentic AI services, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft and China's Alibaba, among more, making it increasingly harder for Google to make its mark. Nevertheless, parent company Alphabet has a planned spending of up to $185bn this year as it attempts to capitalise on the AI market. To bolster its positioning, Google launched a new Gemini Enterprise Agent platform to build scale, govern, and optimise agents. Users can manage aspects of the agents and deliver them through the company's existing Gemini Enterprise platform, which saw a 40pc growth in paid monthly active users quarter-to-quarter. The new launch is Google's answer to Amazon's Bedrock AgentCore and to Microsoft Foundry. The Agent platform provides access to Gemini 3.1 Pro, Google's advanced model yet, the viral Nano Banana 2, audio model Lyria 3, and leading models from Anthropic, including Claude Opus, Sonnet and Haiku and Claude Opus 4.7. Plus, a central monitoring unit lets users oversee and guide all agents from one convenient location. "The agentic enterprise is real - and deployed at a scale the world has never before seen," said Thomas Kurian, Google's Cloud's CEO. And, in a blog post on the company's site, CEO Sundar Pichai noted: "The conversation has gone from 'Can we build an agent?' to 'How do we manage thousands of them?'" Alongside this, Google is adding to its vertical stack offerings with a new cybersecurity platform that combines Google's Threat Intelligence and Security Operations with Wiz's cloud and AI security platform to detect and respond to threats. Moreover, the company also launched the latest iteration of its TPUs, but this time, separating them into two distinct processors. Both chips will become available later this year. TPU 8t will be used for "accelerated" training, while 8i, for "near-zero latency" inference, the company said. These new systems are key components of Google Cloud's AI Hypercomputer, an integrated supercomputing architecture that combines hardware, software, and networking to power the full AI lifecycle, Google said. Don't miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic's digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.

Google Puts AI Agents at Heart of Its Enterprise Money-Making Push

LAS VEGAS, April 22 (Reuters) - Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai is deepening a ⁠push ⁠into enterprise software, signaling to investors at Google's ⁠annual cloud conference that AI agents -- human-like digital assistants -- are a lynchpin of its strategy to monetize artificial intelligence. At the three-day conference in Las Vegas that starts Wednesday, Pichai and key Google executives will seek to position the company's AI tools as production-ready infrastructure for enterprise customers who are emerging as the industry's most reliable revenue stream. Other top AI companies including OpenAI and Anthropic have aggressively shifted resources to business customers in recent months. Mountain View, California-based Google announced on Wednesday ⁠that it was ⁠unifying a set of AI products under the name "Gemini Enterprise." Most notably, this involves rebranding and bulking up Vertex AI, a tool that allows cloud customers to select from a variety of AI models to use for business purposes. Google also announced a set of new governance and security features for AI agents. Agents are powerful digital assistants that can plan, decide, and act autonomously, a fast-growing field that has sparked worries over safety, reliability and oversight. "There's definitely a strategic shift as the models become much more sophisticated," Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian told Reuters in an interview. ⁠The primary ⁠use case of Vertex AI recently ⁠shifted from "old-style machine learning" to a sudden explosion in users building their own custom AI agents, Kurian said. Google is seeking to outflank both its traditional cloud rivals and AI upstarts as pressure mounts to ⁠prove returns on massive generative AI spending. Google Cloud, once seen as a laggard to rivals such as Amazon and Microsoft, has gained traction with enterprise customers, powered by massive bets on AI and years of heavy investment in data centers, custom chips, and networking gear. At GE Appliances, that shift is already tangible. Marcia Brey, a senior executive and Google customer, told Reuters that Google's suite of tools and the enterprise data already stored in Google Cloud allowed her logistics and distribution team ⁠to deploy AI faster compared to other products the company had tested. AGENTS OVER CODING In addition to traditional enterprise providers and ⁠other hyperscalers, a new class of competitors are quickly emerging in enterprise AI: model providers. So far, coding assistants and plug-ins that connect AI models to existing enterprise software have emerged as lucrative channels for AI revenue and payback on their heavy investments. After early success powered by the raw strength of their models, OpenAI and Anthropic are now pushing downstream, marshalling resources into applications that utilize those models to perform specialized tasks, including agent-building tools. But while rivals are pushing hard on their coding products, Google, by contrast, kept coding largely out of the spotlight at its cloud conference. Kurian instead cast the AI battleground as one defined by agents, governance and enterprise deployment, saying that some coding announcements were being held back for its I/O developer conference in May. "Some people are using the models to write code. They ⁠can use Gemini and also other tools like Claude," he said. "But in other cases, we have unique things. There's capability in the platform that nobody else offers." The long-term bet to build out a vast suite of in-house offerings, from models to chips, rather than relying on third-party vendors has given Google an edge over other large cloud providers. This has helped Google to grow its overall cloud market share to 14% at the end of 2025, though it still trails rivals Amazon and Microsoft, according to data from Synergy Research. (Reporting by Kenrick Cai; Editing by Sayantani Ghosh and Shri Navaratnam)

Google puts AI agents at heart of its enterprise money-making push

At the three-day conference in Las Vegas that starts Wednesday, Pichai and key Google executives will seek to position the company's AI tools as production-ready infrastructure for enterprise customers who are emerging as the industry's most reliable revenue stream. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai is deepening a push into enterprise software, signaling to investors at Google's annual cloud conference that AI agents - human-like digital assistants - are a lynchpin of its strategy to monetize artificial intelligence. At the three-day conference in Las Vegas that starts Wednesday, Pichai and key Google executives will seek to position the company's AI tools as production-ready infrastructure for enterprise customers who are emerging as the industry's most reliable revenue stream. Other top AI companies including OpenAI and Anthropic have aggressively shifted resources to business customers in recent months. Mountain View, California-based Google announced on Wednesday that it was ⁠unifying a ⁠set of AI products under the name "Gemini Enterprise." Most notably, this involves rebranding and bulking up Vertex AI, a tool that allows cloud customers to select from a variety of AI models to use for business purposes. Google also announced a set of new governance and security features for AI agents. Agents are powerful digital assistants that can plan, decide, and act autonomously, a fast-growing field that has sparked worries over safety, reliability and oversight. "There's definitely a strategic shift as the models become much more sophisticated," Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian told Reuters in an interview. The primary use case of Vertex AI recently shifted from "old-style machine learning" to a sudden explosion in users building ⁠their own custom AI agents, Kurian said. Google is seeking to outflank both its traditional cloud rivals and AI upstarts as pressure mounts to prove returns on massive generative AI spending. Google Cloud, once seen as a laggard to rivals such as Amazon ⁠and Microsoft, has gained traction with enterprise customers, powered by massive bets on AI and years of heavy investment in data centers, custom chips, and networking gear. At GE Appliances, that shift is already tangible. Marcia Brey, a senior executive and Google customer, told Reuters that Google's suite of tools and the enterprise data already stored in Google Cloud allowed her logistics and distribution team to deploy AI faster compared to other products the company had tested. Agents over coding In addition to traditional enterprise providers and other hyperscalers, a new class of competitors are quickly emerging in enterprise AI: model providers. So far, coding assistants and plug-ins that connect AI models to existing enterprise software have emerged as lucrative channels for AI revenue and payback on their heavy investments. After early success powered by the raw strength of their models, OpenAI and Anthropic are now pushing downstream, marshalling resources into applications that utilize those models to perform specialized tasks, including agent-building tools. But while rivals are pushing hard on their coding products, Google, by ⁠contrast, kept coding largely out of the spotlight at its cloud conference. Kurian instead cast the AI battleground as one defined by agents, governance and enterprise deployment, saying that some coding announcements were being held back for its I/O developer conference in May. "Some people are using the models to write code. They can use Gemini and also other tools like Claude," he said. "But in other cases, we have unique things. There's capability in the platform that nobody else offers." The long-term bet to build out a vast suite of in-house offerings, from models to chips, rather than relying on third-party vendors has given Google an edge over other large cloud providers. This has helped Google to grow its overall cloud market share to 14% at the end of 2025, though it still trails rivals Amazon and Microsoft, according to data from Synergy Research.

Google puts AI agents at heart of its enterprise money-making push

LAS VEGAS, April 22 (Reuters) - Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai is deepening a push into enterprise software, signaling to investors at Google's annual cloud conference that AI agents -- human-like digital assistants -- are a lynchpin of its strategy to monetize artificial intelligence. At the three-day conference in Las Vegas that starts Wednesday, Pichai and key Google executives will seek to position the company's AI tools as production-ready infrastructure for enterprise customers who are emerging as the industry's most reliable revenue stream. Other top AI companies including OpenAI and Anthropic have aggressively shifted resources to business customers in recent months. Mountain View, California-based Google announced on Wednesday that it was unifying a set of AI products under the name "Gemini Enterprise." Most notably, this involves rebranding and bulking up Vertex AI, a tool that allows cloud customers to select from a variety of AI models to use for business purposes. Google also announced a set of new governance and security features for AI agents. Agents are powerful digital assistants that can plan, decide, and act autonomously, a fast-growing field that has sparked worries over safety, reliability and oversight. "There's definitely a strategic shift as the models become much more sophisticated," Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian told Reuters in an interview. The primary use case of Vertex AI recently shifted from "old-style machine learning" to a sudden explosion in users building their own custom AI agents, Kurian said. Google is seeking to outflank both its traditional cloud rivals and AI upstarts as pressure mounts to prove returns on massive generative AI spending. Google Cloud, once seen as a laggard to rivals such as Amazon and Microsoft, has gained traction with enterprise customers, powered by massive bets on AI and years of heavy investment in data centers, custom chips, and networking gear. At GE Appliances, that shift is already tangible. Marcia Brey, a senior executive and Google customer, told Reuters that Google's suite of tools and the enterprise data already stored in Google Cloud allowed her logistics and distribution team to deploy AI faster compared to other products the company had tested. AGENTS OVER CODING In addition to traditional enterprise providers and other hyperscalers, a new class of competitors are quickly emerging in enterprise AI: model providers. So far, coding assistants and plug-ins that connect AI models to existing enterprise software have emerged as lucrative channels for AI revenue and payback on their heavy investments. After early success powered by the raw strength of their models, OpenAI and Anthropic are now pushing downstream, marshalling resources into applications that utilize those models to perform specialized tasks, including agent-building tools. But while rivals are pushing hard on their coding products, Google, by contrast, kept coding largely out of the spotlight at its cloud conference. Kurian instead cast the AI battleground as one defined by agents, governance and enterprise deployment, saying that some coding announcements were being held back for its I/O developer conference in May. "Some people are using the models to write code. They can use Gemini and also other tools like Claude," he said. "But in other cases, we have unique things. There's capability in the platform that nobody else offers." The long-term bet to build out a vast suite of in-house offerings, from models to chips, rather than relying on third-party vendors has given Google an edge over other large cloud providers. This has helped Google to grow its overall cloud market share to 14% at the end of 2025, though it still trails rivals Amazon and Microsoft, according to data from Synergy Research. (Reporting by Kenrick Cai; Editing by Sayantani Ghosh and Shri Navaratnam)