Last refreshed 2026-06-15. Next refresh: weekly.
Why use Falcon 40B on GCP Vertex AI?
GCP Vertex AI offers Falcon 40B with competitive pricing. Vertex AI is Google Cloud's managed AI platform, offering access to Gemini models and hundreds of partner models alongside tools for fine-tuning, grounding, vector search, and end-to-end MLOps pipelines.
Compare Falcon 40B across 4 providers to find the best fit for your use caseSetup recipe
Python + curlpip install google-cloud-aiplatformexport GOOGLE_CLOUD_PROJECT=...import os
import vertexai
from vertexai.generative_models import GenerativeModel
vertexai.init(project=os.environ["GOOGLE_CLOUD_PROJECT"], location="us-central1")falcon-40bRequest example
import os
import vertexai
from vertexai.generative_models import GenerativeModel
# Reads GOOGLE_CLOUD_PROJECT from env; authenticates via Application Default Credentials
vertexai.init(project=os.environ["GOOGLE_CLOUD_PROJECT"], location="us-central1")
model = GenerativeModel("falcon-40b")
response = model.generate_content("Hello")
print(response.text)Gotchas
- For Google-published models use the model name directly, e.g. "gemini-2.0-flash-001". For third-party publishers (Anthropic, Meta, etc.) use the full publisher path, e.g. "publishers/anthropic/models/claude-3-5-sonnet-v2@20241022".
- The examples expect GOOGLE_CLOUD_PROJECT; rename it only if your application config maps the new variable.
Compare Falcon 40B Across Providers
| Provider | Input (per 1M) | Output (per 1M) |
|---|---|---|
| Microsoft Foundry | $1.54 | $1.77 |
| GCP Vertex AI | — | — |
| Alibaba Cloud PAI-EAS | — | — |
| Replicate API | $0.65 | $2.75 |
Capabilities
About Falcon 40B
Falcon 40B is a leading open-source large language model developed by the Technology Innovation Institute in Abu Dhabi, featuring a causal decoder-only architecture with 40 billion parameters. It stands out with its use of rotary positional embeddings, multi-query attention, and FlashAttention, enhancing its contextual understanding and processing efficiency. Trained on 1 trillion tokens using the enriched RefinedWeb dataset, Falcon 40B excels in various natural language processing tasks, ranging from text generation to language translation and question answering. It supports multiple languages and is open under the Apache 2.0 license, promoting both research and commercial use.