Google’s Wiz play

Google used Cloud Next on April 22 to cast Wiz as the center of a bigger security push, pairing the $32 billion deal with new artificial-intelligence defense tools across Google Cloud. (cloud.google.com) Google announced the Wiz acquisition on March 18, 2025, then said on March 11, 2026 that the deal had closed and Wiz would keep its brand inside Google Cloud. Google called the all-cash purchase its answer to two trends: tougher cyberattacks and customers running across multiple clouds. (cloud.google.com 1) (cloud.google.com 2) At Next 2026, Google said its new “Agentic Defense” offering combines Google Threat Intelligence and Google Security Operations with Wiz’s cloud and artificial-intelligence security platform. Wiz separately said it was extending coverage across Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud, Databricks and several agent-building platforms. (cloud.google.com) (wiz.io) Cloud security here means mapping what code, identities, data stores and servers touch each other, then spotting the shortest path an attacker could use. Google said Wiz does that by building a graph of code, cloud resources, services and applications, while Google Unified Security adds a searchable layer of threat and operations data across networks, endpoints, clouds and apps. (cloud.google.com 1) (cloud.google.com 2) That framing turns Wiz into a control point for customers that do not want one cloud vendor securing only its own stack. Google said after the acquisition closed that it would continue supporting Wiz across multiple clouds, and Wiz repeated that position at Next with “any cloud, any platform, any AI.” (cloud.google.com) (wiz.io) Google has been building toward this for more than a year. At Cloud Next 2025, it launched Google Unified Security as a general-availability product and introduced security agents that can triage alerts and analyze malware with Gemini, Google’s flagship artificial-intelligence model family. (cloud.google.com 1) (cloud.google.com 2) The pitch is that human analysts cannot keep up with machine-speed attacks on cloud systems and artificial-intelligence apps. Google’s 2026 security forecast said attackers and defenders are entering an “AI arms race,” and ZDNet reported the Next announcements as Google’s answer to that pressure. (cloud.google.com) (zdnet.com) Wiz’s role in that plan is context. Google’s Wiz page says the product links code, cloud and runtime activity into a single security graph so teams can automate risk reduction and threat response, and Google documentation already describes joint use of Wiz Security Graph with Google Cloud controls. (cloud.google.com) (docs.cloud.google.com) For Google, the deal is less about adding one more security tool than owning the map that shows how modern cloud and artificial-intelligence systems fit together. That is the role Google spent Cloud Next assigning to Wiz. (cloud.google.com) (cloud.google.com)