During Alphabet’s Q4 2025 earnings call, CEO Sundar Pichai added to the confusion regarding where, exactly, the upcoming Gemini-powered Siri will run. Here’s what he said.
A bit of background
Since Apple confirmed that Google’s Gemini would power new Siri features, there has been a lingering question about the privacy aspects of what Tim Cook refers to as a “collaboration” between the two companies.
While many assumed that Google would have access to user data, Apple vaguely countered this notion with its usual privacy-first speech.
Here’s Apple’s original statement on the collaboration:
“After careful evaluation, we determined that Google’s technology provides the most capable foundation for Apple Foundation Models and we’re excited about the innovative new experiences it will unlock for our users.”
Currently, Apple’s foundation models run either on-device or on Private Cloud Compute (PCC), Apple’s cloud AI infrastructure that maintains user privacy when data needs to be uploaded for inference that goes beyond what on-device models can deliver.
While Apple’s statements made it seem like the Gemini-powered Siri would run on its own infrastructure, Bloomberg reported a few days later that this would likely not be the case:
In a potential policy shift for Apple, the two partners are discussing hosting the chatbot directly on Google servers running powerful chips known as TPUs, or tensor processing units. The more immediate Siri update, in contrast, will operate on Apple’s own Private Cloud Compute servers, which rely on high-end Mac chips for processing.
A few days after that, during Apple’s Q4 2025 earnings call, Tim Cook volunteered the following information when analyst Ben Reitzes asked how Apple had decided to partner with Google, and if there was “an opportunity (…) to share in revenue too”:
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