A Guide to AI Cold Starts on Cloud Run

I saw a developer asking on Reddit if there was any “sane way” to manage Cloud Run cold starts for AI across multiple regions. They were experiencing startup latencies of up to 20 seconds, a frustrating gap where the infrastructure is spinning up while the user waits for a response.

The discussion was full of developers who had almost given up on serverless GPUs, with some even migrating back to GKE just to escape the latency. I decided it was time to dive deep into the Mechanics of AI Cold Starts and see if we could find that "sane way."

During my research into hosting models like Gemma 4 on Cloud Run, I had the privilege of co-presenting at Google Cloud Next '26 with Oded Shahar (Senior Engineering Manager for Cloud Run) and our guest speaker Ajay Nair (Global VP of Platform at Elastic).

In our session, "Build AI...

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