GCP Updates 2026-05-14 | Cloud Provider News

Keep BigQuery cost reporting accurate after the billing label change

Google Cloud has a billing update that FinOps teams will want to handle early.
Starting August 11, 2026, the BigQuery Data Transfer Service billing label will change from DATA_TRANSFER_SERVICE to data_transfer_service. Google says this change is meant to unify and expand label coverage for orchestration, load, and merge operations.

If you use billing exports or dashboards, you’ll want to update filters to include both labels. That helps preserve continuity in cost reporting and avoids gaps in your FinOps visibility.

Track AI token usage more closely in BigQuery

BigQuery also added a new way to estimate token consumption for generative AI queries.
Google introduced AI.COUNT_TOKENS, which estimates token counts for text inputs and surfaces input, output, thought, and cache token usage for generative AI queries.

This is handy for teams trying to measure and plan token consumption. It gives FinOps practitioners better visibility for cost control when running or auditing LLM workloads in BigQuery.