Image: Google. Official key art for Gemini 4 Hydrogen.
Google has launched Gemini 4 Hydrogen, a faster model it describes as a daily driver for everyday coding and agentic work, and the way it is bringing the Gemini 4 series to a wider audience. The company posted the news on its official account, and Koray Kavukcuoglu, senior vice president at Google DeepMind and Google's chief AI architect, set out the details in a Keyword blog post dated November 12, 2026.
Meet Gemini 4 Hydrogen.
— Google (@Google) November 12, 2026
It brings cutting-edge intelligence to everyone, with speed and efficiency for everyday coding and agentic work.
Across 4 thinking levels, it stands on its own or teams up with Carbon and Argon — 2.5X faster than 3.8 Flash, outpacing competing models in its class.
Google says Gemini 4 Carbon and Gemini 4 Argon remain its frontier models for deep, long-horizon reasoning, while Hydrogen is built for rapid execution. A model card published with the launch says Hydrogen is adapted from Carbon. Official posts say the new model can work on its own or team up with those larger models.
According to Google, Hydrogen scored 51 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index at its default high thinking level, just above Argon's 50, and 54 at a new xhigh setting. The company says it finishes tasks 2.5 times faster than Gemini 3.8 Flash at that default setting, and that it more than tripled a Terminal-Bench 4.1 score, to 57% from 18.2%. Google also says it cut fabricated claims by more than 5 times compared with 3.8 Flash. Those figures come from Google's launch materials and have not been independently re-run for this article.
Hydrogen has four thinking levels, low, medium, high as the default, and xhigh. Google says it is priced at a flat $1.50 per million input tokens and $7.50 per million output tokens across a 1 million token context window. The model card describes a combined input and output window of up to 1 million tokens, with up to 64,000 output tokens by default in a synchronous response and up to 1 million through a background long decode. This site earlier reported Hydrogen prices appearing in Google Cloud's billing catalogue. The official post states the standard $1.50 and $7.50 rates and does not repeat every catalogue tier from that earlier report.
Google is also introducing Orchestrator in Antigravity for Google AI Ultra subscribers. Official posts say it can switch between models in a single session, with Carbon setting a plan and Hydrogen writing and testing code, then Carbon stepping back in if a check fails. On Terminal-Bench 4.0, Google says that setup reached near-Carbon success rates while using 24% less quota and finishing 19% faster on average.
Availability, at the time of this writing, is a staged global rollout. Google says Search is getting the model for all users, and it calls this the biggest model update yet for Search. In the Gemini app, a footnote on the launch post says free users will get Hydrogen through automatic model selection when the app judges it appropriate. The model is coming to all tiers of Google AI Studio and the Gemini API, including Android Studio and Gemini for business. Paid Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers can use it in Antigravity, and Google also lists Gemini in Chrome and Gemini in Google Sheets for those paid plans. Antigravity's official account said Hydrogen is available there to paid Pro, Ultra, and enterprise customers.
Google DeepMind posted that Hydrogen was built for rapid coding, multimodal synthesis, and everyday workflows, repeating the 2.5 times speed claim and the Intelligence Index comparison with Argon. Demis Hassabis, chair of Google DeepMind, said he was very excited to release the model for everyday coding, agentic work, and all-round use. Logan Kilpatrick, who works on the Gemini API and Google AI Studio, posted the same availability list and the comparison with 3.8 Flash.
Meet Gemini 4 Hydrogen: built for rapid coding, multimodal synthesis, and everyday workflows.
— Google DeepMind (@GoogleDeepMind) November 12, 2026
It finishes tasks 2.5x faster than 3.8 Flash and surpasses Argon on the @ArtificialAnlys Intelligence Index.
This site reported in late October that Google appeared to be testing a Gemini 4 Flash successor under the Hydrogen name. The company has since rolled out Carbon and Argon, and today's launch makes Hydrogen official.
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