Google is testing the use of robots to manage hard drives and equipment at its data centers.

Revealed by Google's VP Partha Ranganathan during his keynote at the Open Compute Summit, the cloud giant shared video footage of robotics in action at their facility.

"Robotics can be very profoundly transformative in how you think about data center operations scaling much, much more, while also having safety and reliability," said Ranganathan.

Ranganathan added that robotics could play a role in areas such as "material movement, rack movement, monitoring or repairing and servicing [equipment], to media management."

In a LinkedIn post, data center journalist and analyst Rich Miller noted that Google cited a specific interest in using robotics for GPU racks which are much heavier than traditional cloud racks.

The full video can be viewed here.

Robotics' role in data center operations has long been flirted with by hyperscalers and colocation providers alike Many of these 'data center robots' take on a dog-like appearance, with developers including Boston Dynamics, Unitree Go1, and Anybotics.

Microsoft created a team dedicated to data center automation and robotics in October 2023. That same year saw Digital Edge, Digital Realty, Scala Data Centers, and Oracle trialing a variety of robots for data center operations.