Apple reportedly agreed $1B annual deal with Google for Gemini technology access

Apple is scaling up pre-training of its foundation models on Google’s Tensor Processing Units. That puts some of the most expensive work in Apple’s AI strategy on chips designed by one of its biggest rivals.

What Apple is actually doing

Pre-training is the heavy-lifting phase of building a large language model. That phase eats compute, which makes the choice of hardware a strategic decision rather than a procurement detail.

Apple’s choice is Google’s TPUs. These are custom chips Google built specifically for machine learning workloads, rather than general-purpose graphics processors adapted for AI.

Apple’s first AFM server model was trained on a cluster of 8,192 TPU v4 chips.

The on-device model, the smaller one designed to run locally on Apple hardware, was built on a 2,048-chip slice of TPU v5p chips.

The performance gains were not trivial. The move gave Apple more than 2x the floating point operations per second, or FLOPS, along with triple the high bandwidth memory.

The chips could do far more math per second and hold far more data close at hand while doing it. The result was training time for large language models cut by up to 2.8 times.

How Apple ended up here

The story starts in July 2024. That’s when Apple revealed it had trained its initial Apple Foundation Models, known as AFM, on Google Cloud TPUs instead of the NVIDIA GPUs most of the industry was using.

Availability was part of the reasoning. The shift came amid NVIDIA H100 supply issues, combined with what the research describes as the superior performance and cost-effectiveness of Google’s TPUs for Apple’s needs.

In January 2026, Apple entered a multiyear agreement with Google for access to Gemini technology, a deal reportedly worth $1 billion annually.

Then, in June 2026, Apple announced its third-generation AFM models. That release marked custom development work done with Google.

Not everything runs on TPUs, though. One of the third-generation models, AFM 3 Cloud Pro, operates on NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs inside Google Cloud.

Apple has also been consistent on one point throughout. The company maintains that no private user data was used to train its foundation models, and it says it honors publisher opt-out preferences.

What this means

The most immediate takeaway is that Google has become a load-bearing pillar of Apple’s AI effort. Between TPU-based training, Google Cloud infrastructure and the Gemini licensing deal, Apple’s AI roadmap now runs through Mountain View in several places at once.

AFM 3 Cloud Pro running on Blackwell GPUs shows Apple is still buying into NVIDIA’s ecosystem, just through Google Cloud rather than as a direct anchor customer for its training runs.