What’s changing
Currently, Google Workspace admins can turn Colab on for their users, allowing them to access the free version of Colab. Beginning today, we’re pleased to announce the Colab Pro and Colab Pro+ standalone subscriptions for Google Workspace customers:
Collab Pro offers 100 compute units that grant access to additional powerful GPUs, memory, features, and productivity enhancements enabled with AI assistance.Colab Pro+ gives you all the benefits of Colab Pro like productivity enhancements enabled with AI assistance, plus an additional 400 compute units for a total of 500 per month that grant access to additional powerful GPUs, along with background execution for our longest-running sessions.
Who’s impacted
Admins and end users
Why it’s important
Colab provides access to Google’s powerful computational resources, which can be used to train machine learning models and perform other data-intensive tasks — all from your web browser. It can be used for a variety of data science and machine learning tasks, including:
Exploratory data analysisDeveloping with the Gemini APIMachine learning model developmentNatural language processing such as text classification and sentiment analysisImage processing such as object detection and image classification.
We know that many Colab users are also Google Workspace users, especially those within educational institutions. Colab Pro and Colab Pro+ can help enhance their work and research with more compute units, faster GPUs, more memory and more.
Further, these offerings can help admins efficiently subscribe an entire team or organization to Colab, thereby minimizing the friction associated with setting up individual accounts for each user. By managing subscriptions at the group level, organizations can more effectively support collaborative workflows and ensure that all team members have access to the resources they need.
Getting started
Admins:
Access to the Admin console is required to initiate purchase. To purchase Workspace Colab Pro or Colab Pro+, go to Billing > Get more services > More products. Visit the Help Center to learn more about how to assign licenses to users after purchase, as well as available Google Workspace subscriptions.For Google Workspace for Education K-12 customers: The access control for Colab is OFF by default and requires Admins to enable this control if they want users in their domain to access Google Colab. Before turning access to Colab ON, Admins are required to obtain parental consent for <18 users because Colab is included as an Additional Service. Consent can be requested with this
notice template.
End users: Colab is OFF by default and can be enabled by your Admin. Note that if you have purchased Colab’s “Pay As You Go” offering for yourself, you can continue using it in addition with Colab Pro and Pro+.
Rollout pace
Gradually rolling out over the coming months to all customers
Availability
Colab Pro and Colab Pro+ are standalone subscriptions available to all Google Workspace customers with a
verified domain.