Apple Nears $1B Google Deal for Siri AI Overhaul

Apple is close to finalizing a deal to pay Google approximately $1 billion annually for a custom version of its Gemini artificial intelligence model, which will power a major overhaul of the Siri voice assistant expected to launch in spring 2026.

The agreement, reported by sources familiar with the matter, represents a pragmatic step for Apple to enhance Siri's capabilities amid ongoing delays in its internal AI development. The Gemini model, estimated at 1.2 trillion parameters, dwarfs Apple's current cloud-based AI system, which operates on about 150 billion parameters. This scale is expected to improve Siri's handling of complex tasks, such as summarizing information, planning multistep actions and maintaining contextual understanding in user interactions. For comparison, parameters indicate the model's capacity to process and learn from data, with larger counts generally enabling more sophisticated performance, though factors like training data and architecture also play key roles.

Under the partnership, the custom Gemini model will run exclusively on Apple's Private Cloud Compute servers, ensuring user data remains isolated from Google's infrastructure and aligning with...