Using Gemini 1.5 Flash on GCP Vertex AI
Implementation guide · Gemini 1.5 · Google DeepMind
GCP Vertex AI exposes Gemini 1.5 Flash through model ID gemini-1.5-flash. Use the setup steps, sourced pricing, capabilities, and official provider links below to validate this route before deployment.
Last refreshed 2026-06-15. Next refresh: weekly.
Quick Start
- 1
- 2Use the GCP Vertex AI SDK or REST API to call
gemini-1.5-flash— see the documentation for request format. - 3
Code Examples
pip install google-cloud-aiplatformGOOGLE_CLOUD_PROJECTgemini-1.5-flashFor 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".
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("gemini-1.5-flash")
response = model.generate_content("Hello")
print(response.text)Pricing on GCP Vertex AI
| Type | Price (per 1M) |
|---|---|
| Input tokens | $0.07 |
| Output tokens | $0.30 |
| Image input | $0.13 |
| Video input | $0.47 |
| Audio input | $0.04 |
Capabilities
About Gemini 1.5 Flash
Gemini 1.5 Flash is a large language AI model by Google, crafted for speed and efficiency in high-volume scenarios 145. As a lightweight model, it's optimized for fast processing and cost-effectiveness, making it ideal for real-time applications and high-frequency tasks 567. With its multimodal capabilities, Gemini 1.5 Flash effectively processes and reasons across multiple data types, including text, images, audio, video, and PDFs 145. Despite its smaller size compared to Gemini 1.5 Pro, it excels in tasks like summarization, chat applications, and data extraction from lengthy documents, employing "knowledge distillation" to transfer essential knowledge from larger models 5.