The two tech giants announced a multi-year partnership Monday that puts Google’s Gemini at the center of Apple’s AI strategy. The next generation of Apple Foundation Models—the technology powering everything from Siri to future Apple Intelligence features—will run on Gemini’s cloud infrastructure and models.
“After careful evaluation, Apple determined that Google’s AI technology provides the most capable foundation for Apple Foundation Models and is excited about the innovative new experiences it will unlock for Apple users,” the companies said in a joint statement shared by NewsFromGoogle on X.
Damilare Odedina
Bloomberg previously reported Apple will pay Google around $1 billion annually for access to Gemini models. That’s on top of the roughly $20 billion Google already earns each year as the default search engine on iPhones. Apple now depends on Google for both search and the AI brain that will power its devices.
The partnership was announced the same day Alphabet briefly hit a $4 trillion market cap, surpassing Apple for the first time since 2019. Apple, currently valued at $3.8 trillion, reached the $4 trillion milestone in 2025 but has since slipped as investors reward companies with clearer AI strategies.
For Apple users, the most immediate change will be a “more personalised Siri” expected to launch in spring 2026 as part of iOS 26.4, likely in March or April. The new version is supposed to understand personal context, see what’s on your screen, and control individual apps in ways the current Siri can’t. Apple showed this off at WWDC 2024, then kept pushing back the launch as the engineering teams couldn’t get it working right.
Apple stressed that Apple Intelligence will continue to run on Apple devices and Private Cloud Compute while maintaining the company’s privacy standards. The deal isn’t exclusive, according to TechCrunch, and Apple confirmed it isn’t changing its existing OpenAI partnership. ChatGPT will remain integrated into Siri for complex queries that need the model’s broader knowledge base.
Not everyone is celebrating the partnership. Elon Musk, CEO of xAI—which develops competing AI model Grok—criticised the deal on X. “This seems like an unreasonable concentration of power for Google, given that [they] also have Android and Chrome,” Musk wrote in response to the announcement.
Musk has previously sued Apple, accusing the company of unfairly favouring ChatGPT in its App Store. His criticism highlights a growing concern: Google’s expanding influence across multiple platforms—from mobile operating systems to web browsers to now powering AI features on the world’s most popular smartphone.
The partnership confirms months of behind-the-scenes negotiations between Apple and multiple AI providers, including OpenAI and Anthropic. By choosing Google, Apple is betting that Gemini’s multimodal capabilities and cloud infrastructure will deliver what users have been waiting for: an intelligent, conversational assistant that actually works.
Wedbush analyst Dan Ives called the announcement what “the Street has been waiting for with the elephant in the room for Cupertino revolving around its invisible AI strategy,” describing it as an “incremental positive” for both companies.
Google now powers AI on both Android and iPhones. OpenAI works with both Apple and Microsoft. The arrangement means companies building AI together today might be fighting over the same users tomorrow.
Ejiro Onose
