What’s a billion between friends?

An Office Hours question asked by Bob V., June 9, 2026.

Q: The Apple–Google deal for the frontier model is multi-year with no known end date. What happens after — and what is Google really getting out of it?

When that deal came out, people jumped to conclusions. I talked to Laura Martin {of Needham), who assumed Google would run Siri, and thus get all the data from Apple. Since that data was the real gold mine, even without much revenue from Apple, Google would begin to control the user’s data and experience. This would be check mate to Apple. I was skeptical from the start that Apple would ever release end-user data. That has now been made clear: this is a technology licensing deal including some Google training data but no services from Google and only some cloud capacity from Google using Nvidia chips but running Apple’s own Private Cloud.

The follow-up sessions after the keynote answered most of it. Federighi and his staff have been adamant that Google gets nothing — certainly no data. Only one of the many models accessed through Core AI runs on Google Cloud, outside Apple’s own private servers. It’s the most powerful one, but it’s a world model, and Google has no access to anything. The tools aren’t Google’s either. It’s not Gemini. It’s not their image model. It’s Apple’s own foundation models, several of them, and one happens to run with Google in the cloud, privately and securely.

People assumed far more than what is actually happening here. Google’s contribution is also probably swappable: at some point Apple may decide to do it themselves. And let’s not forget that Google sends Apple more than twenty billion dollars a year. So now Apple sends one back. What’s a billion between friends?

Apple is not going to give away the single most important thing it has, which is its relationship with the customer.

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Editor’s Note: This was one of the questions asked by participants in Asymco’s June 2026 Office Hours live Q&A session, open to Asymco One subscribers.

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