Google

Google rolled out two more of its custom AI chips on Monday, and the company says it has now shipped four new TPU systems in a single year — a first in the decade-plus history of its in-house silicon. The new systems are TPU 8tx, built for confidential inference, and TPU 8i Max, built for AI agents that chew through massive context windows. The announcement came Monday morning from Amin Vahdat, Google’s senior vice president and chief technologist for AI and infrastructure. It fills out an eighth-generation TPU lineup that started in April with the 8t training chip and the 8i reasoning chip. “This is the first time we have introduced four TPU systems in a single year,” Vahdat wrote in the announcement. ...

Four of the biggest names in AI agreed on October 30 to read the same two lines in a website’s robots.txt file as a “no” to AI training. Google, Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic each said they will honor a single shared policy token, __usage_ai-training, so a site owner can state the preference once instead of writing a separate rule for every lab. The Verge first reported the deal, and TechRadar picked up the story this week as publishers started asking what it actually does. ...

Google has bought Crusoe’s unfinished data center site in southeast Wyoming and plans to invest $17 billion to build it out, Crusoe confirmed on November 6. Full story in slides above — Sources: TechCrunch, Bloomberg via TechCrunch, November 6–7, 2026.

Google announced on November 3 that Search, Gemini, Gemini Notebook and Gemini in Classroom will be switched off by default for K-12 student accounts until school administrators turn them on, with the rollout expected in early 2027. Full story in slides above — Sources: Google blog post by Chris Phillips, The New York Times, TechCrunch, Ars Technica, November 2026.

Google rolled out Gemini Omni 1.2 Flash on November 5, 2026, with native 15-second video generation and editing, stronger consistency with reference images, and a 30% price cut to $0.07 per second for 720p video. Full story in slides above — Sources: Google (The Keyword blog), Digital Trends, November 5–6, 2026.

Google is going to Wyoming. The company announced Thursday that it will build its first data center in the state, a $17 billion bet on Laramie County that pairs the campus with one of the largest carbon-capture power projects ever tied to a tech company. The Google Wyoming data center will sit near Cheyenne, built with Tallgrass Energy, Black Hills Energy, American Electric Power (AEP) and Related Digital. Google hasn’t said when the campus itself will open, but the power plant behind it has a date: AEP and its partners plan to start construction in 2026 and have it fully running by the end of 2028. ...

Google told schools on November 3, 2026, that a full ban on its AI tools comes with a price: students lose Google Search, too. Gemini, Gemini Notebook, Gemini in Classroom and Google Search will be entirely off for K-12 student accounts until administrators explicitly turn them on. Google announced the change Tuesday alongside Guided Learning, now available worldwide in Classroom, with a Search pilot later this month. The catch, reported by The New York Times, is what happens when a district says no altogether. Chris Phillips, Google’s vice president and general manager for education, told the Times that “Search and AI are deeply integrated,” and that students at those schools “will not have access to search, and they’ll see a message from their school that indicates it’s not available.” ...

Google’s AI chips just phoned home from space. And their first message was poetry. On Oct. 30, 2026, Google’s Project Suncatcher prototype answered its first prompt from orbit. Engineers on the ground sent a simple request to an onboard Gemma 4 model running on one of the satellite’s Tensor Processing Units, asking it to write a haiku about being in space. As the spacecraft passed over Svalbard, Norway, the answer came back down: “Blue marble below / Data streams in silent grace / Starlight feeds my core.” ...

OpenAI, Google, Microsoft and Anthropic pledged Friday to give publishers a single shared way to block their content from AI training scraping, after years of publishers having to set separate rules for every crawler. Full story in slides above. Sources: AFP via Malay Mail and Inquirer, SiliconANGLE via Oossa, October 30-31, 2026.

Four of the biggest AI companies agreed on Friday to stop making publishers beg each of them separately. OpenAI, Google, Microsoft and Anthropic said on Oct. 30 that they will honor a single robots.txt token that lets any website opt out of AI training with one entry, instead of a separate blocking rule for every company’s crawler. Until now, a publisher that didn’t want its articles feeding AI models had to maintain a small pile of bot-specific rules: GPTBot for OpenAI, ClaudeBot for Anthropic, Google-Extended for Google, and more besides. Miss one, and that company’s crawler kept feeding. The new token collapses all of that into a single line, __usage_ai-training, written where a crawler name normally goes in robots.txt. ...

Reddit is about to close its open front door. The company said Thursday it will test a logged-in only experience in select markets outside the United States, ending roughly two decades in which anyone could browse the site without an account. It’s the bluntest response yet from a major platform to a problem that has been building all year: Reddit Google AI Mode traffic simply isn’t arriving, and the site’s search referrals fell by more than 1 million a week on average in October. ...

Reddit CEO Steve Huffman blamed Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode for a sharp drop in search referrals on October 29, and said Reddit will test a mostly logged-in experience to protect its data and ad business. Full story in slides above — Sources: Reuters via Channel News Asia and The Hindu, Invezz, Analytics Insight.

Alphabet’s third-quarter results were good by almost any normal standard, and Wall Street hated them anyway. Google’s parent company reported revenue of $127.6 billion for the three months ended September 30, up 25% from a year earlier. Earnings per share came in at $2.12. Both numbers missed Wall Street’s expectations, and Alphabet shares fell about 10% in after-hours trading on Wednesday, October 28, then stayed down roughly 10% in premarket trading on Thursday morning. Reuters reported that the premarket drop put more than $400 billion in market value at risk. ...

Google unveiled Gemini 4 Carbon on October 28, 2026, its newest frontier AI model built for cybersecurity and long engineering tasks, with introductory pricing of $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens. Full story in slides above — Sources: Reuters, SiliconANGLE, ET CISO, October 28-29, 2026.

Google unveiled Gemini 4 Carbon on Wednesday, its second flagship AI model in two weeks, and the company says it’s the best-performing model it has ever built. Independent benchmark tracker Artificial Analysis agrees, at least for now: Carbon scored 59 on its Intelligence Index v5.0, putting it ahead of Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.5 at 58 and OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra at 57. You can’t use it yet. That’s the catch, and it’s deliberate. Like its predecessor Gemini 4 Argon, Carbon is going first to a small group of vetted cybersecurity defenders through Google’s Fairwind Program, plus the US government through a voluntary pre-release testing process. Everyone else — developers, businesses, and regular users — will have to wait for a wider rollout Google hasn’t dated. ...

Google DeepMind has unveiled Genie 4, a real-time world model that generates explorable, photorealistic worlds from a text or image prompt — now with native audio and live text steering. Full story in slides above — Sources: Google DeepMind blog (October 27, 2026), The Indian Express, TechTimes, October 28, 2026.

Google DeepMind unveiled Genie 4 on October 27, 2026, and the pitch is simple enough to state in one sentence: type a prompt, step into the world it makes, and then keep rewriting that world while you are still standing in it. The new Google Genie 4 world model generates photorealistic scenes in real time, and for the first time in the Genie line, those scenes come with sound of their own. ...

OpenAI plans to buy Google TPU chips, The Information reported on Tuesday, in a move that would put ChatGPT’s maker on its rival’s silicon for the first time as an owner rather than a renter. The report, citing a person familiar with the matter, did not disclose financial terms or a timeline for any purchase. That’s a striking shift for a company that has built its empire on Nvidia hardware. OpenAI is already one of the largest buyers of Nvidia’s graphics processing units, the chips it uses to train AI models and run them for users. Amazon, Microsoft and Google parent Alphabet plan to spend as much as $600 billion combined this year on AI infrastructure, according to Reuters, and OpenAI’s reported purchase sits right in the middle of that spending race. ...

Goldman Sachs is putting $500 million behind a bet that Main Street, not just Silicon Valley, will decide how far AI spreads in the American economy. On October 22, the bank announced a new Small Business AI Institute, built with Anthropic, Google, Meta and OpenAI, to train entrepreneurs and help them put AI to work in their companies. The timing isn’t an accident. A Goldman survey released with the announcement found that 86% of small businesses in its program now use AI, up from 56% in 2024. That’s the headline number. The harder one sits right behind it: only 15% of those surveyed say AI is fully integrated into their core operations. ...

Google sent four of its AI chips into orbit on October 1, 2026, as the first flight of Project Suncatcher — a year-long mission testing whether AI data centers could one day run in space. The prototype, built with Planet Labs, will run its TPUs in short bursts while researchers watch how the hardware handles radiation and vacuum conditions. Sources: CNBC via ChosunBiz; Google Research blog via GCN.com; RocketNews; Bytevyte, October 2026. ...