At Cloud Next we introduced a significant expansion of our Imagery Insights portfolio, leveraging innovation from Google Earth AI, designed to help you transform how you understand our planet and make decisions. Today we are also announcing high-resolution, building-level data on solar potential and existing solar arrays, part of Earth AI, to help utilities and service providers accelerate renewable energy adoption and optimize network planning.
Expanding your view with Aerial and Satellite Insights
In the coming weeks we’ll expand our Imagery Insights portfolio with the launch of Aerial and Satellite Insights (Experimental). Complementing Street View Insights, Aerial and Satellite Insights puts global, high-resolution imagery at your fingertips and broadens your analysis from the fine details of a city street to a bird’s-eye view of the planet. Through the high resolution and angular view diversity of 3D aerial imagery or the flexible freshness of high resolution satellite imagery, you are empowered to make data-driven decisions at any scale covering a wide range of tasks. Aerial and Satellite Insights is integrated with Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, so you can scale operations while reducing in-the-field presence, risk, and costs. You can also utilize BigQuery and Earth Engine to combine your proprietary data with high resolution imagery context for detailed spatial analysis. This can help you solve problems like optimizing wireless network planning by identifying signal obstructions, monitoring vegetation encroachment near critical infrastructure, or recognizing untapped market opportunities for renewable energy.
Aerial and Satellite Insights empowers organizations to revolutionize site selection and asset management. It enables more comprehensive site analysis and automated inventory audits, using historical data to detect changes and predict patterns over time. For example, when combined with digital terrain models, the approach enables telecommunication professionals to optimize wireless network planning and minimize signal obstructions.
Aerial and Satellite Insights enables telecommunication professionals to optimize wireless network planning and minimize signal obstructions.
Fresh, comprehensive aerial and satellite imagery
To bring Aerial and Satellite Insights to organizations at scale, we partnered with Airbus and Vexcel to expand our Google Maps catalog of aerial and satellite imagery.
Our expanded partnership with Google underscores Airbus’ commitment to delivering the highest quality and freshest data to our partners. By adding Airbus’ industry-leading satellite imagery to Google's Aerial and Satellite Insights, we enable enterprise customers to move beyond visualization toward true decision-making with deeper, data-driven insights about the world in near real-time.Head of Space Digital at Airbus Defense and Space
Vexcel has built an extensive aerial imagery and geospatial data library spanning 45+ countries, which serves as a foundational layer for real-world AI. In close collaboration with Google Maps Platform, we’re discovering new ways to semantically understand everything that can be seen in the physical world, analyze it, and generate knowledge at scale. Together, we’re unlocking new imagery-derived insights that were difficult, costly, or even impossible to access before. Google brings world-class expertise in geospatial technology and AI that is also opening the door to a broader set of non-technical, non-geospatial users - and we see even more possibilities ahead.Chairman and CEO of Vexcel
Empowering analysis with Aerial and Satellite Models
We're also introducing Aerial and Satellite Models (Experimental) within Google Cloud’s Model Garden. Developed as part of Google Research’s Remote Sensing Foundation effort, these models are designed to transform your geospatial workflows by enabling you to extract planetary-scale insights without the need to train or maintain complex models yourself. Plus, the model isn't restricted to our catalog. Bring your proprietary aerial or satellite imagery, and apply our advanced AI to unlock insights from the data you already own.
With its advanced zero-shot and open vocabulary analysis capabilities, you can identify objects by simply describing them (like find all “wind turbines") and perform semantic retrieval to locate complex scenes (such as "a river running through a city center") using natural language. The models also can enable powerful semantic change detection, helping you understand the meaning and direction of changes—distinguishing between a long-standing and newer "industrial factory", or identifying project phases like "pre-construction" and "active construction." This multi-modal capability helps you understand the broader semantic and temporal context of the Earth, not just its individual components, enabling more proactive and data-driven decisions across a wide range of critical use cases.
With Aerial and Satellite Models, an energy analyst can type a prompt like “find large HVAC cooling towers”. The model identifies relevant cooling tower objects across large geographies.
Accelerate renewable energy adoption and optimize network planning with solar data
Based on our comprehensive Aerial and Satellite imagery, you can also use our solar data to understand a building’s potential to generate clean energy. Solar Insights (Experimental) is a high-resolution dataset designed to pinpoint market opportunities and accelerate solar adoption. By providing analysis-ready data on per-building solar potential, roof statistics, and existing solar arrays across over 90% of buildings in the US and Europe, this tool helps utilities and service providers identify high-value customers and optimize network planning. Integrating these building-level details with our weather models allows organizations to accurately predict rooftop solar power contributions, increasing energy reliability and driving more profitable investments in renewable infrastructure.
How The Milken Institute is using Solar Insights
The Milken Institute's Community Infrastructure Center uses Solar Insights to assess rooftop solar potential for community resilience centers— libraries, schools, and clinics, and other essential anchor institutions — and pair it with climate risk and demographic data to identify where resilience hub investments will deliver the greatest impact in underserved communities.
Solar Insights provides building and community-level clarity we've never had before. In minutes, our platform partners can evaluate rooftop solar potential for any community anchor facility and layer it with climate and socioeconomic data to pinpoint where resilience investments matter most. It's already reshaping how the Milken Institute scopes clean energy projects with our community organizations.Director, Milken Institute
Our solar dataset helps utilities and service providers identify high-value customers and optimize network planning.
Gaining ground-level precision with Street View Insights
In the coming weeks we're elevating Street View Insights with the Experimental release of powerful LiDAR data. Imagine being able to access Google Street View's vast repository of over 280 billion 360° and 3D images covering infrastructure, now with more precise measurements. This innovation minimizes the need for costly and time-consuming asset/site visits, allowing you to more accurately determine the height of utility poles, the clearance of overhead lines, or the dimensions of road signs right from your desk. You can even use natural language queries, powered by Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, to extract insights much faster, making asset management and condition assessments more efficient and shifting maintenance from reactive to proactive.
Get more precise 3D measurements and infrastructure insights from Street View Insights with LiDAR.
We believe that by providing you with these powerful, seamlessly integrated tools, we can help you make more cost-effective, data-driven business decisions throughout the lifecycle of your initiatives.
Ready to explore how Google’s advanced geospatial AI can elevate your insights? Sign up for early access, and visit our website to learn more.
