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Comment by ls_stats | Hacker News Reader

I don't get it, Google could heavily subsidy their Gemini models to make it more attractive, but they prefer to not do it. I don't know one soul who is using Gemini models to code. Even OpenAI who doesn't have money or capacity is offering their Luna model at $1.2 per 1M/out.

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Why would they? Unless they have lots of unused tpu real estate that they could host it on “for free” they would be bumping more profitable workloads off of machines to give away that capacity to people with zero long term loyalty. There is no business reason for google to subsidize these models.

OpenAI has too much money. They’re spending their money in stupid ways.

Having people use the model generates real world training data which could be useful. Other than that I think you're right that there is little reason to artificially boost users with subsidized pricing.

> OpenAI has too much money

I think they got some data center deals very cheap when no on was thinking about data centers. Dario didnt want to take that risk so Anthropic didnt make the deals earlier but now paying Google and Elon higher rates.

What you're not seeing are the subsidized Google Cloud startup credits, which includes Gemini. If you're in that program, you choose Gemini because it's essentially "free" and consistent.

Google was cash-flow negative in Q2 2026, and is raising a lot of debt.

I am not sure they can afford to subsidize Gemini more than they already do.

Notably that's not due to subsidization but rather due to investment in capex for future growth. The reason to not subsidize is largely because of already being hardware constrained. There is no extra unsold capacity to use.

> investment in capex for future growth

Future growth needs to materialize for this to be profitable. Right now what they have is a cash-flow negative reality.

> There is no extra unsold capacity to use.

I have no evidence of this.

Neither I have evidence that they would be in the position of subsidizing further AI usage.

Google's open secret is that they are also capturing spend on OAI and Anthropic tokens.

It makes sense. All these models are money losing businesses.

As a business Google might want to focus on fundamental research 2-3 years from now and not compete on who acquires more money losing customers. Just stay little behind and invest money better.

the race for the smartest/cheapest model is a race to the bottom. selling the tools is much more profitable.

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