Blocked by Automated GPU Quota Denials on Academic/Research Grant

Google Cloud Cloud Foundations & Onboarding
1

Hello Google Cloud Community,

I am a Postdoctoral Researcher working on deep learning workloads. I am currently blocked by automated quota limits on my project and am looking for advice or internal escalation on how to proceed.

My Setup & Context:

  • Funding Source: Google Cloud Educational Grant
  • Current Resources: I have a single g2-standard-12 instance running with 1 NVIDIA L4 GPU

The Roadblock:

Because of my deep learning training requirements, I need to scale my experiments. I am currently utilizing 100% of my GPUS_ALL_REGIONS quota (current limit: 1, current usage: 1).

Whenever I attempt to submit a quota increase request (even just to increase GPUs from 1 to 2), the request is instantly refused by the automated quota evaluation system. Since this project is funded by an educational grant instead of a traditional commercial credit card, it seems the automated risk-detection system instantly flags and auto-denies any premium resource requests.

Steps Already Taken:

  1. I opened a support ticket. Support informed me that they cannot manually override this and that my account requires the involvement of the Google Sales Team to “align the necessary resources with my account.”

  2. I reached out to the Google Sales Team using the official contact form as instructed, but I have not received a response. My academic timeline is tight, and my research is entirely stalled.

My Questions/Ask:

  1. Is there a way for Google Cloud support or community managers to apply the internal “Verified Academic/Research Project” trust flag to my billing profile/project so my quota requests aren’t instantly rejected by automated risk algorithms?

  2. Has anyone else running deep learning experiments on an EDU grant found a way to successfully scale their GPU quotas when the Sales team is unresponsive?

I would highly appreciate any guidance or help from Google employees or community champions to help escalate this. Thank you!

4

Hi there, fellow student with roughly similar situation (mine is Reinforcement Learning). Did you ever find a solution?

5

Hi Matt, unfortunately not. I’ve tried everything I could and discussed the issue with both the Quota and Billing teams. Apparently, if you have a personal account, there are significant restrictions, and there doesn’t seem to be any way around them.

I’m quite disappointed with the experience. It feels like there are strong silos between Google teams: each team is limited to its own area, unable to act on issues involving other parts of the organization, and there doesn’t seem to be much ownership of the problem as a whole.

That said, I’d definitely be interested to hear if you or your team manage to find a solution or workaround.