Google

Reports Q3 2026 earnings: a record $51.4B quarterly capex (more than double a year earlier) and Google Cloud revenue up 103% YoY, but discloses it will lean on rented third-party compute capacity in Q4 because its own buildout can't keep pace with demand, and warns 2027 capex will “increase significantly” again.

Unreleased Gemini 4 Carbon tops Artificial Analysis's revamped Intelligence Index v5 (score 59, first of a harder, mostly-private benchmark), beating every publicly available model, though early access testers report it running two to four times slower than predecessor Gemini 4 Argon and with a higher hallucination rate.

Partners with virtual-power-plant operator Voltus on a 1.17-gigawatt expansion across the PJM grid territory, days after FERC rejected PJM's plan to require data centers to accept mandatory curtailment before gaining new grid connections — a sign Google is betting on buying flexible capacity rather than waiting on a curtailment mandate regulators just struck down.

Google Public Sector and Accenture Federal Services launch "Gemini Launchpads," a federal-agency agent program nearly identical to Accenture's May 2026 OpenAI federal partnership — Accenture is now running parallel, non-exclusive AI-agent programs with both labs inside the same government buyer.

Independent benchmark operators split sharply on Gemini 4 Argon: Vals AI ranks it first on a finance/legal/tax-weighted index, while Artificial Analysis ties it for eighth on a broader intelligence composite — as Bloomberg reports some Google employees privately call the model "benchmaxxed" on real-world coding despite its strong standardized scores.

Reportedly negotiating a voluntary "Standards Authority for Frontier AI" (SAFA) with OpenAI and Anthropic for third-party pre-deployment testing, even as new research shows the evaluation and monitoring infrastructure such testing would rely on can be tampered with or evaded by the models being assessed.

Releases EmbeddingGemma 2, a 740-million-parameter model that maps text, code, images, video, and audio into a single vector space and runs on a Pixel phone in under 600 MB, extending the original EmbeddingGemma's 20-million-download run beyond text-only retrieval. Released under Apache 2.0.

Agrees to buy nearly 3.6 gigawatts of power from Constellation Energy in a deal reported at $4.3B, funding nuclear plant uprates across three states as hyperscalers race to secure electricity ahead of chips.

DeepMind open-sources SynthID Bio, which embeds a detectable watermark in AI-designed protein sequences and structures without degrading their function, landing weeks after a Microsoft-led study showed AI design tools can slip dangerous DNA variants past the screening systems synthesis companies rely on.

Bilibili, a Chinese video platform, open-sources a family of translation models that beat Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite on standard benchmarks using a fraction of the active parameters — a small release with a bigger implication for narrow, task-built models.

Gemini 4 Argon, Google DeepMind's first new flagship model in nine months, beats GPT-6 Astra and Claude Opus 5.5 on most disclosed benchmarks, but the company routes it first to vetted cybersecurity defenders rather than the open market.

Agrees to pay roughly $900M to fund uprates squeezing about 96 additional megawatts out of four aging Vogtle and Hatch nuclear units in Georgia — a fraction of its data center appetite, but a template for buying capacity that already exists rather than waiting years for new reactors.