During his Google Cloud Next 26 keynote CEO Thomas Kurian said:
“We’re collaborating with Apple as their preferred cloud provider to develop the next generation of Apple Foundation Models based on Gemini technology. These models will now power future Apple Intelligence features including a more personalized Siri coming later this year.”
This is a big deal. This news didn’t come from Apple, which is notoriously tight lipped about such things. There wasn’t a press release about it. But assuming it’s true, and there absolutely no reason to doubt Kurian, then its worth considering what it means.
Pretty much every phone on the planet is going to be powered by Google Gemini AI going forward – certainly Android services will be, and this now bring iPhones into the mix. This is an almost absurdly great position for Google to be in, as AI moves out to the edge.
Every phone on the planet. That’s potentially billions of devices.
As we know, model preferences are far from sticky. They change day to day. Who knows what Apple will be using in 2027 or 2028? Model choices change quickly, but rolling these changes out at Apple ecosystem scale would be no mean feat. A ton of things would break. And Apple actually building its own frontier model based on Gemini – that does feel kind of sticky. Over the longer term Apple will very likely build and lead with its own model. But it certainly took a while for Apple to make Maps competitive, for example, after its initial use of Google Maps. Google Search is still the default on Apple devices (to be fair Google pays for this privilege, but I believe the point stands.) This is a landmark win for Google Cloud.
There are all sorts of questions – not least architectural. Will Siri be running AI with local models, maybe something like Google Gemma, or is it about Siri’s back end running on Google Cloud with Gemma. Is this actually a client side win, or a cloud win. Given Apple’s strict approaches around privacy one assumes there will be a local component. Plenty to unpick though.
Nobody chooses a model for life. But for this era of AI service buildout Gemini powering Siri is very notable. It’s a huge cloud win whichever way you look at it, and frankly neither AWS or Microsoft Azure could have done so, if it was based on owning a competitive frontier model. Unlike Google they lead with third party models.
I will be watching Google I/O closely next week to put this into further context.
disclosure: Google Cloud is a client, and paid for my T&E to the event.
Paul Hinz says:
May 14, 2026 at 5:08 pm
Stack decisions often are based on increasing revenue from existing channels, creating new channels, or protecting revenue channels. In the case of each, Apple has the dominate hardware platform, but the greatest revenue may be from those services on the platform. Siri is woefully lagging compared to free AI services available (as is Alexa), and they need a decision today for something better. Question is, if they build their own, can they finally build something as-good-as.
James Governor says:
May 15, 2026 at 11:10 am
that seems correct Paul – though in this case i think both parties benefit. Apple has moved strongly towards a services-based revenue model over the last few years. thanks for your comment!