Google chief executive Sundar Pichai has revealed that more than 8.5 million developers are now building applications and experiences every month using the company's artificial intelligence models, underscoring the accelerating scale of adoption across its AI ecosystem. The disclosure came alongside a landmark capital expenditure projection of nearly $190 billion for the current year, directed primarily at AI data centres, custom silicon, and model training infrastructure.

AI Infrastructure and Developer Ecosystem

Pichai said demand is rising sharply across developers, enterprises, and consumers alike. Google's model APIs are now processing nearly 19 billion tokens per minute, a figure that reflects the raw computational throughput underpinning its AI services. More than 375 Google Cloud customers each processed over one trillion tokens during the past year alone — a scale that signals enterprise AI is moving well beyond pilot deployments.

The $190 billion capex commitment, if realised, would represent one of the largest single-year technology infrastructure investments by any company globally, reinforcing Alphabet's position as a central node in the AI buildout race alongside Microsoft and Amazon.

Consumer AI Products Hit New Milestones

On the consumer front, Google's Gemini app has crossed 900 million monthly active users, more than doubling its user base compared to the previous year. AI-powered search is also gaining significant ground: AI Overviews now reaches over 2.5 billion monthly users, while AI Mode has surpassed one billion monthly active users. These numbers suggest AI-native interfaces are fast becoming the primary way users interact with Google's core search product.

New Tools and Model Upgrades Unveiled

Google unveiled several new AI tools at the event. Gemini 3.5 Flash is a faster model optimised for coding and real-world workflows, while Gemini Spark is a new personal AI agent designed to perform tasks autonomously on behalf of users. The company also updated its AI infrastructure with the latest generation of Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), aimed at accelerating AI training and inference at scale.

Two notable product additions were also announced: 'Ask YouTube', an AI-powered feature enabling conversational search within videos to surface the most relevant moments, and 'Docs Live', which allows users to create and organise documents through voice-based prompts.

AI Transparency and Industry Adoption of SynthID

Google expanded its AI transparency efforts through SynthID, its watermarking technology for AI-generated content. The company said additional firms — including OpenAI, Kakao, and Eleven Labs — have adopted SynthID to improve verification of AI-created images, videos, and audio. The move positions Google as a standard-setter in AI content provenance at a time when regulators globally are pressing for greater accountability in generative AI outputs.

Google's AI-First Commitment

Pichai described artificial intelligence as the most transformative technology for advancing Google's mission and improving lives globally, reaffirming the company's AI-first strategic posture. With developer adoption, enterprise throughput, consumer reach, and capital deployment all moving in tandem, Google is signalling that its AI transition is no longer a roadmap item — it is already the operating reality.