Google has solidified its position as the premier AI supplier in Silicon Valley by landing a massive $1 billion-a-year contract with its chief rival, Apple. The deal will see Google’s advanced Gemini AI become the core intelligence for Apple’s next-generation Siri. This is a significant victory for Google, as Apple chose its 1.2 trillion parameter model after an extensive evaluation period that pitted Gemini directly against OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude.
For Apple, the partnership is a strategic concession to its lag in the generative AI race. The company is banking on Google’s “ultrapowerful” model to serve as an “interim solution” to power the long-promised overhaul of Siri, which is set to debut next year. This 1.2 trillion parameter model dwarfs the complexity of Apple’s current 150-billion parameter cloud AI, providing the necessary horsepower to handle complex data and understand user context at a level Siri has never before achieved.
The new Siri, code-named “Linwood” and planned for an “iOS 26.4” release, will use the Gemini model for its most critical “summariser” and “planner” functions. This will enable the assistant to synthesize information and plan the execution of complex tasks. The project to integrate this third-party AI, known as “Glenwood,” is being led by Apple’s software engineering chief Craig Federighi and Vision Pro creator Mike Rockwell, indicating its critical importance to the company’s future.
Even as it uses Google’s technology, Apple is strictly enforcing its privacy standards. The Gemini model will run on Apple’s dedicated Private Cloud Compute servers, which have already been allocated for this purpose. This “walled-off” system ensures that Google never gains access to Apple’s user data, allowing Apple to use a rival’s product without compromising its core privacy values. This setup makes Google a “behind-the-scenes” supplier, a role Google seems willing to accept for such a lucrative and strategic foothold.
This deal expands Google’s reach as an AI supplier, with companies like Snap Inc. also building on its Vertex AI platform. For Apple, however, the reliance is temporary. The company’s management is still pushing its teams to develop a 1 trillion parameter in-house model to eventually replace Gemini. But with Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro already topping AI leaderboards and constantly improving, replacing this “temporary” fix will be an uphill battle for Apple’s AI teams.