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Physix Frontier · News Briefing Card (TMTPost · Oct 14, 2026)

Google Opens Gemini 4 Argon, Pricing at One-Fifth of Rivals

KEY FACTS

  • On October 13, Google opened the Gemini 4 Argon model globally, with a promotional price of $2 per million input tokens.
  • The model's context and output limits were raised from 64,000 tokens to 1 million tokens.
  • Google Cloud's Q2 revenue reached $24.8 billion, up 82% year over year, with a backlog of $514 billion.
  • Alphabet raised its fiscal 2026 capital expenditure guidance to $195 billion to $205 billion.
  • Gemini 4 Argon leads on some benchmarks but trails Claude Opus 5.5 on the composite intelligence index.

KEY DATA

$2 per million tokensPromotional input price
$10 per million tokensPromotional output price
$4 per million tokensStandard input price
1 million tokensContext limit

PHYSIX OBSERVATION

Google has pushed pricing down to one-fifth of its rivals, relying on TPU and full-stack cloud cost amortization rather than pure subsidies. This marks large-model competition entering a phase of competing on infrastructure efficiency; the pricing room for small and mid-sized model vendors will be squeezed further, and while users enjoy low prices in the short term, the long term depends on whether Google can convert its order backlog into stable profit.

Source: TMTPost report