Sundar Pichai teases I/O 2026 as Google starts selling TPUs and YouTube Premium grows
Source: 9to5Google
Alphabet Q1 2026 Earnings
Alphabet reported its Q1 2026 earnings, 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, and the 2026 edition is less than three weeks away. Pichai said the company is “excited to share more about Search at I/O.” Last year’s conference launched AI Mode. He highlighted upcoming 2026 announcements such as:
Key quotes from Pichai:
- “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.”
- “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.”
TPU Sales to External Customers
Google will soon sell TPUs (Tensor Processing Units) to a “select group of customers in their own data centers.” Demand is rising from AI labs, capital‑markets firms, and high‑performance‑computing applications.
Read more about the TPU offering →
Subscription Growth
Subscriptions remain a major growth area for Google. In Q1 2026, the company recorded the strongest quarter ever for consumer AI plans, driven primarily by adoption of the Gemini app.
From January to March, YouTube Music and YouTube Premium saw the largest quarterly increase in non‑trial subscribers since the services launched in June 2018.
Overall, Google now has 350 million paid subscriptions, up 25 million from the previous quarter.
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