Google AI
No company sits closer to daily digital life than Google, and none is moving faster to place artificial intelligence at its centre. This is where we follow that push: Gemini and its expanding family of models, DeepMind's safety research, the reinvention of Search around AI, and the on-device agents now reading the screens of Pixel phones. We cover each development from a European perspective — weighing the genuine usefulness against the data-protection, antitrust and dependency questions that follow when one company mediates search, phone, and assistant for a continent that relies on it.
The GAFAM Reality Index - Google
- Respect for Europe35%
- Respect for Users45%
- Respect for the Future53%
- Overall44%
Google Nuclear Power Deal: The AI Race Has Become a Power-Plant Race
Google signed a deal for 3,590 megawatts of power — a quarter of it nuclear, over twenty years — purely to feed its AI data centres. And it’s not alone: Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta have all locked up nuclear power too. The AI race has quietly become a power-plant race, where electricity, not chips, is the binding limit. Why the cost lands on grids, prices, and the places with least leverage — and why this reframes European sovereignty as an energy question.
The Agent That Watches Your Screen: Google’s Gemini Now Reads Every App — Including Your Bank
Google’s Pixel 11 gives Gemini an agentic power that reads every app on your screen — banking and messages included — to act on your behalf. A genuine leap in usefulness, and the most intimate access an AI has ever had to your phone. What it means, especially for Europe.
We Cannot Drink DATA: The AI Boom Hits the Water Table
Google’s $15 billion Indian data centre has drawn protests reading “We cannot drink DATA.” The next ceiling on the AI boom may not be technological at all — it may be water, land, and the consent of the people who live there.
Google Turned Earth Into a Deepfake Canvas — and Pulled It Within a Day
Google gave the planet a satellite-image deepfake tool, then pulled it a day later. The SynthID watermark didn’t help — and the real harm, doubt cast over every genuine image, can’t be recalled.
Brussels Fined Google €890 Million Today. The AI Part Nobody Is Reading.
The European Commission today issued two non-compliance decisions against Google under the Digital Markets Act — €460 million for self-preferencing its own shopping, hotel, transport and sports results in Search, and €430 million for restricting businesses from steering customers to cheaper channels outside Google Play. It is the largest DMA penalty to date. But the more consequential document was adopted seven days earlier: a binding specification requiring Google to open eleven Android features to rival AI assistants by 2027 and to share search data with competing AI chatbots. Europe just banned the Search playbook before it could be run on AI. gafam.ai’s European analysis.