Google Colab (Colaboratory) is a hosted Jupyter Notebook service from Google. A notebook is a document that combines executable code cells with text, images, HTML and LaTeX. Colab needs no setup: the notebook opens in a web browser and runs on Google's servers in pre-configured runtimes.
Code runs in a virtual machine private to each account, and runtimes can include GPUs and TPUs, processors that speed up machine learning. Notebooks can be shared, keep a version history, and connect to Google Drive. Gemini, Google's AI model, is built in: it generates, explains and debugs code from plain-language requests, and can write and run analysis code to answer a question. Colab is especially suited to machine learning, data science and education. Idle virtual machines are deleted, and in the free version a notebook runs for at most 12 hours.
Colab is free of charge, but free resources are not guaranteed and active users get priority. Paid plans (Pro, Pro+ and a pay-per-use plan) buy compute units for faster accelerators, more memory and longer runs. Colab Enterprise is the version for companies inside Google Cloud and Vertex AI.