Google and AI startup Replit have partnered to better compete with GitHub, using AI to enhance software development.

Microsoft-owned GitHub is benefiting from its parent company’s heavy investment in AI, and Google is clearly interested in closing the gap. The company has turned to Replit, a startup focused on using AI for collaborative software development.

“Our partnership with Google Cloud on infrastructure and AI is a clear step toward our mission of bringing the next billion software creators online. AI has changed software development forever. The seamless idea-to-deployed software experience that Replit provides developers will continue to set a new bar for software creation,” said Amjad Masad, the CEO and Head of Engineering at Replit. “We’re thrilled to build this.”

“Generative AI can bring significant new capabilities to businesses and developers, including the ability to easily, safely, and scalably create new software applications and online experiences with little or no coding experience,” said June Yang, VP, Cloud AI, and Industry Solutions at Google Cloud. “Google Cloud infrastructure and foundation models in Vertex AI will power Replit’s widely-adopted platform, delivering more performance and scalability to millions of developers around the world.”

Replit already has 20+ million developers using its products, making it one of the fastest-growing developer platforms. As part of the deal, Replit developers will be able to tap into the power of Google Cloud in addition to Replit Ghostwriter.

Replit’s cloud infrastructure and AI products like Ghostwriter make it one of the fastest places to go from idea to deployed software application. Through this new partnership with Google Cloud, developers using Replit will have global access to Google Cloud infrastructure and Google’s foundation models on Vertex AI. The collaboration aims to support Google Cloud’s goal of enabling companies to accelerate their development process using AI.