Alphabet held its Q1 2026 earnings today, and CEO Sundar Pichai gave the first tease of what to expect at I/O next month.
I/O is Google’s biggest show of the year. With the 2026 edition less than three weeks away, Pichai said the company is “excited to share more about Search at I/O.” Last year’s conference saw the launch of AI Mode. He highlighted 2026 announcements like Personal Intelligence, agentic booking, and global Search Live availability. The CEO also shared that:
- “Even as we’ve brought new AI features into our results page, we’ve reduced Search latency by more than 35% over the past five years.”
- “And since upgrading AI Overviews and AI Mode to Gemini 3, we’ve reduced the cost of core AI responses by more than 30% thanks to continued hardware and engineering breakthroughs.”
On the Gemini front, he said Google is “focused on pushing the next frontiers of foundation models, including intelligence, agents and agentic coding.”
Google will soon sell TPUs (Tensor Processing Units) to a “select group of customers in their own data centers.” There is increased demand from “AI labs, capital markets firms, and high-performance computing applications.”
Subscriptions are a big growth area for Google, and Q1 2026 saw the “strongest quarter ever for our consumer AI plans, primarily driven by adoption of the Gemini app.”
Similarly, January-March saw the “largest quarterly increase in the total number of non-trial subscribers” for YouTube Music and Premium since the subscriptions launched in June 2018.
In all, Google now has 350 million paid subscriptions, which is an increase of 25 million from the previous quarter.
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