This is the third post in a series cataloguing predictions about the major AI labs through the end of 2028. The first two posts covered Anthropic and OpenAI; subsequent posts will cover Meta and the Chinese open-weight frontier on the same template.
Google DeepMind is the strangest entry in this series because it is not really a startup at all. It is a research division of a $2.5 trillion advertising company, with a cross-subsidy structure no independent AI lab has any chance of replicating, a vertical compute integration no other lab can match, and a distribution surface (Search, YouTube, Workspace, Android, Chrome, Maps, Photos) that reaches more daily users than every other AI lab combined. The predictions below are anchored on what is, at base, a very different kind of trajectory: not the curve of a startup becoming an institution, but the curve of an institution becoming an AI company. They are also more anchored than the prior two posts in the series, because Google’s product cadence is metronomic — I/O in May, Made by Google in August, earnings on a fixed quarterly calendar, anniversary model previews in November — so the predictions reduce to a relatively narrow band of variation around an event schedule that is already public.
Where Google DeepMind stands as of mid-May 2026, for context:
- Gemini 3 Pro and Gemini 3 Deep Think shipped November 18, 2025. Gemini 3.1 Pro shipped February 19, 2026 — 2x reasoning improvement over 3 Pro, #1 on 12 of 18 tracked benchmarks, 1M token context, 65K token output.
- Gemini app: 750M monthly active users (as of April 2026), the fastest-growing AI consumer product.
- Gemini Enterprise: 8M paid seats across 2,800 companies; handles 45% of all enterprise AI queries inside the Fortune 500 firms using Google Workspace.
- AI Overviews: 2B monthly users across Google Search.
- Google Cloud Q1 2026 revenue: $20B (+63% YoY); operating income $6.6B; operating margin expanded from 9.4% to 32.9% year-over-year. Cloud is now 18% of Alphabet’s total business.
- Compute: Ironwood (TPU v7) launched April 2026 — 10x performance over TPU v5p, 4x over Trillium; 4,614 FP8 TFLOPS per chip, 192GB HBM3E, 9,216-chip pods. The Anthropic compute deal — 1M+ TPUs deployed through 2026, 1GW dedicated — made Anthropic a Google Cloud anchor customer.
- Robotics: Gemini Robotics + Gemini Robotics-ER (March 2025), Gemini Robotics 1.5 (September 2025), Gemini Robotics ER-1.6 (April 2026). Boston Dynamics is a named partner.
- Science: AlphaFold has 3M+ researchers in 190+ countries; Hassabis and Jumper won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Isomorphic Labs (the DeepMind drug-discovery spinout) has guided to “first human dosing by end of 2026.”
- Waymo: ~700K rides per week across 11+ US service areas (as of Q1 2026). Mesa, Arizona factory ramping toward a “tens of thousands per year” target. Tokyo and London mapping ongoing.
- Antigravity (Google’s agentic IDE) reached preview in late 2025; positioned against Cursor and Claude Code.
- Aluminium OS / Googlebook: the Android + ChromeOS convergence platform, with OEM partners (Acer, ASUS, Lenovo) committed for late 2026 shipping.
- Alphabet Q1 2026 revenue: +22% YoY. CapEx guidance for 2026 is in the $185–200B range, characterized by management as “supply-constrained” rather than “demand-driven.”
The predictions below are the cautious frame — what should happen if Google continues to execute on its visible cadence and nothing dramatic breaks. Confidence levels reflect how willing I am to be wrong publicly about a particular line.
2026 (Balance of Year)
Models
- Gemini 3.1 Pro reaches GA across all surfaces (Gemini app, Vertex, AI Studio, NotebookLM, Antigravity) at I/O (May 19–20 2026, high)
- Gemini 3.1 Flash launches as the new mid-tier (May 2026, high)
- Gemini 3.1 Deep Think opens beyond safety testers to Ultra subscribers (May 2026, high)
- A Gemini 3.1 Pro point-release (“3.1.1” or a quietly upgraded checkpoint) with better long-context retention and lower TTFT (Jul 2026, medium)
- Gemini 4.0 Pro preview lands on the November anniversary (Nov 2026, high)
- Gemini 4.0 ships with native long-horizon agentic capability as a marketed primary feature, not a preview (Nov 2026, medium)
Cloud, Business & CapEx
- Q2 2026 earnings (late July) — Cloud growth in the 55–65% YoY band, backlog crosses $500B, CapEx guidance held or raised (Jul 2026, high)
- Q3 2026 earnings (late October) — Cloud quarterly revenue $22–24B, growth in the high 50s (Oct 2026, high)
- Cloud annualized run-rate $90–95B by year-end (Dec 2026, high)
- 2027 CapEx guidance pre-announced in the $220–250B range (Dec 2026, medium)
- Cloud passes 20% of Alphabet’s total revenue (end of 2026, medium)
Compute (TPU)
- Ironwood reaches general availability for Google Cloud customers (Q3 2026, high)
- TPU 8 (or “8t/8i”) begins availability to first-tier Vertex partners (Jul 2026, high)
- A second hyperscale TPU customer in the Anthropic class closes — most likely an enterprise rather than an AI-lab buyer (end of 2026, medium)
Distribution
- Project Astra graduates from “experimental” to a real product surface — live multimodal assistant in the Gemini app, the Gemini Live tab, and as a primary entry point on Android (May 2026, high)
- AI Mode (the chat-style alternative to Search) rolls out internationally to ~80 markets (May–Jun 2026, high)
- Android 17 stable ships alongside Pixel 11 in September; Gemini becomes the default assistant surface and Google Assistant is effectively sunsetted in name even if not technically (Sep 2026, high)
- Personal Intelligence (browser- and app-context-aware Gemini) expands across Chrome and Workspace (2026, high)
Verticals & Enterprise
- Workspace AI tier consolidation; new “Agentic Workspace” SKU for enterprises with cross-app workflows (Docs → Sheets → Gmail → Calendar) (Jun 2026, high)
- Gemini for Healthcare, Gemini for Financial Services, and Gemini for Public Sector launch as pre-configured vertical SKUs (Sep 2026, high)
- Gemini Enterprise crosses 12M paid seats (end of 2026, medium)
Open-Weight (Gemma)
- Gemma 4 family fills out — Code-Gemma 4, PaliGemma 4 (vision), MedGemma 4 (medical), Gemma 4 Robotics variant tied to the Boston Dynamics partnership (Jun 2026, high)
- Gemma family monthly Hugging Face downloads surpass Llama (end of 2026, medium)
Hardware
- Made by Google event (Aug 13 2026, by historical cadence) — Pixel 11, Pixel 11 Pro, Pixel Watch 4, Pixel Buds Pro 3, Pixel Fold 2 (Aug 2026, high)
- Gemini Nano 3 ships on Pixel 11 and rolls to Samsung Galaxy S24+ and recent Pixels (Aug 2026, high)
- Aluminium OS / Googlebook details firm up; first Googlebooks from Acer/ASUS/Lenovo dated for late October to early November (Aug 2026, high)
- Android XR glasses get a real launch date (Samsung Galaxy Glasses or equivalent shipping Q4 2026 or early 2027) (I/O May 2026, medium)
- First Googlebooks ship and receive their public review cycle (Oct–Nov 2026, medium)
Robotics
- Gemini Robotics ER-2.0 ships (Q3 2026, medium)
- Boston Dynamics partnership produces a named consumer or commercial pilot with a Gemini-Robotics-powered Atlas demo (Q4 2026, medium)
- Hassabis’s “ChatGPT moment for robotics” comes within striking distance but does not actually arrive in 2026 (Dec 2026, medium)
Science
- A DeepMind science paper at the AlphaFold tier of public attention — most likely AlphaEvolve producing a concretely useful algorithm or chip-layout result, or an AlphaProteo-successor for antibody design (Q3 2026, medium)
- AlphaProof / AlphaEvolve produces a publicly-noticed advance on Mathematics Olympiad–style problems (Jun 2026, medium)
- A DeepMind science announcement at CES 2027 (telegraphed late 2026) (Dec 2026, medium)
Isomorphic Labs
- IND (Investigational New Drug) application filed for first oncology candidate (Sep 2026, high)
- First human patient dosed in lead oncology trial (Dec 2026, medium)
- A pharma partner (Lilly or Novartis) expands its deal on the next tranche (Q4 2026, medium)
Waymo
- Public-rider launch in Washington, D.C. for summer tourism (Jun 2026, high)
- Crosses 750K rides per week (Jul 2026, high)
- Two additional cities pick up public riding (likely Detroit, Las Vegas, or Nashville) (Sep 2026, high)
- Freeway routes available in all current major markets (Sep 2026, high)
- Hits 1M rides per week (the explicit company target) (Dec 2026, high)
- Tokyo and/or London begins commercial service for residents (Dec 2026, medium)
Developer Tools
- Antigravity 1.0 GA, deeply integrated with Gemini 3.1 Pro and MCP (May 2026, high)
- An Antigravity point-release with multi-repo, long-horizon coding agent features (Q4 2026, medium)
Geopolitics & Antitrust
- Antitrust appellate arguments at the D.C. Circuit — oral arguments late October or November (Q4 2026, high)
- No appellate ruling in 2026 (Dec 2026, high)
- An EU regulatory consent decree is reached around Gemini’s Search integration (Q3–Q4 2026, medium)
2027
Models
- Gemini 4.0 Pro GA across all surfaces (Q1 2027, high)
- Gemini 4 Flash and Flash Lite ship in the same window (Q1 2027, high)
- Gemini 4 Nano lands on Pixel and partner Android devices (Q1 2027, high)
- Gemini 4 Deep Think publishes a model card with a verified IMO-gold result (Q1 2027, medium)
- Gemini 4.5 Pro preview at I/O 2027 — 2M+ token context with real retention, faster TTFT, stronger video understanding (May 2027, high)
- Gemini 4.5 Pro GA (Q3 2027, high)
- Gemini 5 Pro preview at the November anniversary (Nov 2027, high)
- Gemini 5 Deep Think rolls out alongside, focused on multi-day autonomous work (Nov 2027, medium)
Cloud, Business & CapEx
- 2026 full-year revenue closes at $440–460B (Q4 2026 reported Jan 2027, high)
- Cloud annualized run-rate around $95B at start of year (Jan 2027, high)
- 2027 CapEx confirmed in the $220–260B band (Jan 2027, high)
- Cloud Q2 2027 quarterly revenue $28–32B, growth in the 40–50% band (Jul 2027, medium)
- Cloud Q3 2027 quarterly revenue $33–38B (Oct 2027, medium)
- 2028 CapEx telegraphed in the $280–330B band (Oct 2027, medium)
- Cloud annualized $130–150B by year-end (Dec 2027, medium)
Compute (TPU)
- TPU 9 generation announced at Cloud Next 2027 (training-only first, inference variant later) (Apr 2027, high)
- TPU 9 inference variant ships (H2 2027, medium)
- A third hyperscale TPU pod cluster online; at minimum 5GW total Google AI compute (end of 2027, medium)
Distribution
- Astra at scale: the multimodal assistant becomes the default Google surface, replacing legacy Assistant entirely (May 2027, high)
- A Veo / Imagen / Genie consolidation into a single “Google generative media” suite, possibly with real-time interactive Genie experiences in YouTube (May 2027, medium)
- Android XR glasses retail launch — late Q3 or Q4 2027, US first, $999–1,499 (Q3 2027, medium)
- Android 18 stable (Sep 2027, high)
- Aluminium OS reaches v2; Googlebook generation 2 announced (Sep 2027, medium)
Verticals & Enterprise
- Gemini Enterprise crosses 15M paid seats with full agent suite and agent-to-agent protocols (Apr 2027, medium)
Open-Weight (Gemma)
- Gemma 5 family ships mid-year — Code-Gemma 5, MedGemma 5, an explicit MoE variant tuned for commodity GPUs (Jul 2027, high)
- Gemma family Hugging Face downloads overtake Llama on a monthly basis if not already (Jul 2027, medium)
Hardware
- Made by Google 2027 (August) — Pixel 12 series, Pixel Watch 5, refreshed Buds, possibly Pixel Tablet refresh (Aug 2027, high)
- Pixel 12 ships with on-device agentic capability that’s noticeably ahead of Apple Intelligence’s progress (Aug 2027, high)
- iPhone 19 lands; Apple is now visibly behind on AI capability per benchmark (Sep 2027, medium)
Robotics
- Boston Dynamics / Atlas with Gemini Robotics performs real warehouse pick-and-pack work at a named customer (CES Jan 2027, medium)
- A Gemini-on-vehicle integration with a Tier-1 OEM announced (likely non-Waymo: BMW, Honda, or similar) (CES Jan 2027, medium)
Science
- A DeepMind science announcement at AlphaFold tier — most plausibly AlphaEvolve producing a verifiable algorithmic improvement to a real industrial workload, or an AlphaProteo-successor antibody design result (Q1 2027, medium)
- Genie / Veo unification with clear robotics-simulation utility (end of 2027, medium)
Isomorphic Labs
- Phase 1 readout — first oncology candidate clears safety; early efficacy signal published or hinted at conference (Q3 2027, medium)
- A second clinical candidate enters Phase 1 (Q3–Q4 2027, medium)
- Phase 2 plans announced; pharma partner expands deal — upfront raise from $45M/$37.5M to $100M+ on next tranche (Q4 2027, medium)
- First peer-reviewed publication tying clinical results back to model predictions (Dec 2027, low)
Waymo
- Crosses 1.5M rides per week (Q2 2027, high)
- Mesa factory output ramps toward “tens of thousands per year” target (2027, high)
- Tokyo crosses 25K rides per week or London opens to public riders (May 2027, medium)
- Crosses 2M rides per week (Jul 2027, medium)
- 18–22 active US service areas; service hours uniformly 24/7 in mature markets (end of 2027, medium)
- NYC and Boston operations begin public riding (Q4 2027, medium)
- Waymo annualized revenue passes $5B with positive unit economics in mature markets (Q4 2027, medium)
Developer Tools
- Antigravity 2.0 reaches credible feature parity with Cursor and Claude Code; Google publishes share-of-developer metrics (May 2027, medium)
- Heavy emphasis on multi-repo, long-horizon coding agents (2027, high)
Geopolitics & Antitrust
- D.C. Circuit ruling in Q2 — most likely upholds the bulk of Mehta’s remedies rather than ordering structural divestiture; Sherman Act monopoly finding stands (Q2 2027, medium)
- Either side petitions for en banc or cert; the saga does not end here (Q3 2027, medium)
- An EU regulatory framework for AI-integrated search exists (2027, medium)
2028
Models
- Gemini 5 Pro GA, with native multimodal output (interleaved text/image/audio/video) as the default (Q1 2028, high)
- Gemini 5 Flash and Nano ship in the same window (Q1 2028, high)
- Gemini 5 Deep Think opens to Ultra; model card cites a published proof of a previously open mathematics problem (Q1 2028, medium)
- Gemini 5.5 Pro preview at I/O 2028 — multi-week task execution as a marketed feature, not a demo (May 2028, high)
- Gemini 5.5 Pro GA (Q3 2028, medium)
- Gemini 6 Pro preview at the November anniversary; marketed as “an agent, not a model” (Nov 2028, medium)
Cloud, Business & CapEx
- 2027 full-year revenue closes at $560–600B (Q4 2027 reported Jan 2028, high)
- Cloud annualized run-rate ~$140B at start of year (Jan 2028, high)
- 2028 CapEx guidance lands at $300–350B (Jan 2028, medium)
- Cloud Q2 2028 quarterly revenue $40–45B (Jul 2028, medium)
- Cloud margins visibly improving as TPU economics compound (2028, medium)
- Cloud Q3 2028 quarterly revenue $50–57B; growth in the 30–40% range (Oct 2028, medium)
- Cloud annualized run-rate around $200B by year-end (Dec 2028, medium)
- 2029 CapEx guidance climbs to $300B+ (Dec 2028, medium)
Compute (TPU)
- TPU 10 announced at Cloud Next 2028 (Apr 2028, medium)
- External TPU sales pass an inflection — Anthropic’s gigawatt commitment is online; additional named cloud-resale customers announced (Apr 2028, medium)
- The argument that TPU/GPU customers have reached rough parity for new AI workloads becomes defensible (2028, low)
Distribution
- Astra-everywhere — same multimodal assistant is the surface in Gemini app, Search AI Mode, Pixel/Android, Workspace, Chrome, Antigravity, and the car (May 2028, high)
- Personalization unified across all surfaces via Personal Intelligence (May 2028, high)
- Android XR glasses v2 announced, $200–400 cheaper than v1 with an actual app developer story (May 2028, medium)
Verticals & Enterprise
- Gemini Enterprise crosses 25M paid seats across 5,000+ enterprise customers (Apr 2028, medium)
- Antigravity 3.0 / Cloud Code consolidation; agentic coding is its own product category by now (May 2028, medium)
Open-Weight (Gemma)
- Gemma 6 family ships mid-year; open-weight ecosystem firmly Google-led (Jul 2028, medium)
Hardware
- Made by Google 2028 (August) — Pixel 13 series, Pixel Watch 6, refreshed Buds (Aug 2028, high)
- A second-generation Android XR product beyond glasses — possibly a higher-end mixed-reality device or a dedicated AI wearable that isn’t glasses (Aug 2028, low)
- Pixel 13 ships with Gemini Nano 5 and on-device agentic capability ahead of Apple Intelligence (Aug 2028, medium)
- iPhone 20 lands — Apple’s catch-up generation; Google’s marketing positions Pixel as the AI-native device unambiguously (Sep 2028, medium)
- Aluminium OS / Googlebook gen 3; combined Android + Aluminium installed base meaningfully threatens Windows in non-enterprise segments (Aug–Sep 2028, low)
Robotics
- Boston Dynamics / Gemini Robotics partnership produces a named consumer or commercial deployment — Atlas in a real factory at scale, or a domestic-robotics demo with a major appliance brand (CES Jan 2028, medium)
- A new TPU-on-vehicle integration with at least one Tier-1 OEM (CES Jan 2028, medium)
- Gemini Robotics ships as a licensable model for general robotics developers (2028, medium)
Science
- DeepMind science announcements: AlphaEvolve hitting multiple industrial deployments with measurable economic impact; an internal Google datacenter scheduling improvement worth measurable billions is disclosed (2028, medium)
- A Genie/Veo/robotics convergence that’s clearly the simulation backbone for both Waymo and the Boston Dynamics partnership (2028, medium)
Isomorphic Labs
- Phase 2 data (or first Phase 2 trial start) (Q3 2028, medium)
- A partnered drug moving toward Phase 3 — internally developed or one of the Lilly/Novartis pipeline candidates (Q4 2028, medium)
- The “AI-discovered drug reaches market” story is now visibly two-to-four years out rather than hypothetical (end of 2028, medium)
Waymo
- Possibly broken out as a separate segment for reporting (Jan 2028, medium)
- Crosses 3M rides per week (Q2 2028, medium)
- Mesa factory and Geely Zeekr lines together producing tens of thousands of autonomous vehicles per year (2028, medium)
- Tokyo and London at meaningful commercial scale; Paris and Sydney plausibly open testing (Q2 2028, medium)
- 28–35 active US service areas, uniformly 24/7 (end of 2028, medium)
- Cumulative Waymo rides cross 250M (end of 2028, medium)
- Waymo annualized revenue $12–18B and operationally profitable; unit-economics question definitively answered (Q4 2028, medium)
Geopolitics & Antitrust
- US presidential election outcome shapes the late-year narrative; AI policy is a real campaign topic (Nov 2028, high)
- The AI antitrust case rumbling since 2027 reaches a clearer trajectory — dismissed, settled, or set for a substantive next phase. Cautious read: no structural divestiture by year-end (Q4 2028, medium)
- The Search-case appellate saga continues but produces no structural change (2028, medium)
What Would Break the Trajectory
The predictions above hold only if the next two and a half years don’t contain a discontinuity. Ranked by probability:
- A DOJ remedy harsher than expected — forced divestiture of Search or Android rather than the Chrome-only outcome the cautious frame assumes.
- A serious capability stumble — Gemini 4, 4.5, or 5 fails to ship competitively against OpenAI/Anthropic at a critical moment.
- An EU regulatory action that materially constrains Google’s distribution moats.
- A safety or trust incident — AI Overviews or Gemini producing harmful output at scale, followed by a regulatory hammer.
- A capability plateau across the industry (rather than specific to Google).
- US/China conflict disrupting TSMC fabs and therefore TPU production.
- Demis Hassabis departure or significant DeepMind leadership churn.
- A serious recession compressing cloud and ad revenue simultaneously.
The honest sentence: absent a discontinuity, Google has the strongest hand of any AI lab. The distribution moat (Search, YouTube, Workspace, Android, Chrome) is the largest competitive advantage in the industry, and the TPU vertical integration is the second-largest. The only reason Google is not the obvious frontrunner today is that Demis Hassabis ran DeepMind as a research lab for too long before Sundar Pichai pivoted it to product execution. That pivot has happened. The trajectory above assumes the pivot continues to be executed at the level it has been since Gemini 3.
What’s Different About Google DeepMind
Three observations that distinguish Google DeepMind’s trajectory from Anthropic’s and OpenAI’s, and which I think frame the rest of the series.
Google has a distribution moat the others cannot match. Anthropic reaches users through API integrations and enterprise contracts; OpenAI through ChatGPT subscriptions and the Microsoft channel. Google reaches users through Search (3B+ monthly), YouTube (2.7B), Workspace (3B), Android (3B+ devices), Chrome (3B+ users), and Maps. The Gemini app is the smallest of these surfaces. Most of Google’s AI distribution is invisible — users encounter it as a feature of a product they already use rather than as a destination they navigate to. This is a different competitive game from the one OpenAI and Anthropic are playing, and it favours Google asymmetrically over time.
Google has vertical compute integration no other lab approaches. TPUs are designed at Google, fabbed at TSMC under Google’s specification, and deployed exclusively in Google data centers. The Anthropic TPU deal in late 2025 — 1M+ chips, 1GW dedicated capacity — was the first time another frontier lab adopted TPU at scale, and it changed the industry’s read on Google’s compute story from “interesting in-house program” to “credible alternative to Nvidia.” Anthropic’s 4x cost advantage over OpenAI in training compute is, in significant part, a TPU advantage. Google’s predictions above include “external TPU sales pass an inflection by 2028” specifically because the silicon advantage is the kind of structural moat that compounds in a way capability alone does not.
Google has a scientific research record no other lab matches. AlphaFold’s Nobel Prize is the most legible single fact about this, but the broader pattern — AlphaProof, AlphaEvolve, AlphaMissense, AlphaGenome, the Isomorphic Labs spinout, the long materials-science arc, the DOE Genesis Mission partnership — is that DeepMind has, for fifteen years, produced fundamental scientific results at a rate no contemporary academic institution and no contemporary research lab can match. This is the legitimacy moat. When the AI conversation turns to “what is this technology actually good for,” Google’s answer is genuinely different from Anthropic’s or OpenAI’s. The others can point to productivity gains; Google can point to a Nobel Prize.
A fourth observation worth naming, because it doesn’t fit either of the prior two posts: Google has businesses adjacent to AI that are also at frontier-defining scale. Waymo is approaching a multi-million-rides-per-week robotaxi business with positive unit economics in mature markets. Isomorphic Labs has clinical-stage AI-designed pharmaceuticals. The Boston Dynamics partnership is approaching real warehouse and household deployment. Hardware (Pixel, Android XR, Googlebook) is becoming a coherent platform. None of these has a clean equivalent at OpenAI or Anthropic — neither company is shipping autonomous vehicles, dosing patients, building humanoid robots, or running a multi-OS hardware platform. Google’s trajectory is, on inspection, four trajectories at once, which is part of why this post is the longest in the series.
The implication: Google DeepMind is the lab most likely to be the largest of the three by 2028, the one whose competitive position is hardest to displace, and the one whose risk profile is most concentrated in regulatory rather than capability outcomes. This is, on inspection, the position the second-mover often arrives at: not first across the finish line but built to win the longer race.
What’s Next
The next post in this series will cover Meta’s open-weight effort — the Llama family, the FAIR-to-Superintelligence-Labs reshape, the Reality Labs and AR/VR convergence with AI, and the open-weight strategy as a competitive moat against the proprietary frontier. After that: the Chinese frontier (DeepSeek, Zhipu, Moonshot, Qwen, and the SOE consolidation question).
Sources for the baseline data in this post: Alphabet Q1 2026 earnings (Fortune), Gemini 3.1 Pro launch (Google), Gemini 750M users (Tech Insider), Ironwood TPU launch (Google Cloud Blog), Google TPU v7 specifications (Tom’s Hardware), DeepMind cancer drug clinical trials (Creati AI), AlphaFold five years later (MIT Technology Review), Google Cloud Next 2026 agents (TheNextWeb), Anthropic-Google TPU deal (SemiAnalysis).
