The Most Important Announcement at NEXT '26 Was a Sidecar

This is a submission for the Google Cloud NEXT Writing Challenge Google Cloud NEXT '26 made 260 announcements. Most of the discussion has rightly gone to the headline acts: the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, 8th-gen TPUs, the Cross-Cloud Lakehouse, Agentic Defense. Announcement #124 is not one of those. It's titled "Predictive latency boost in GKE Inference Gateway." The official blurb says it cuts time-to-first-token by up to 70% by replacing heuristic guesswork with real-time capacity-aware