Google I/O 2026: Gemini 3.5 Flash, Agentic Era, and TPU 8i Unveiled

At Google I/O 2026, CEO Sundar Pichai announced a series of AI advancements, marking the company's shift into the 'agentic Gemini era.' Key highlights include the release of Gemini 3.5 Flash, a frontier model with improved coding and reasoning capabilities, available today across products and APIs. The company also introduced Gemini Spark, a 24/7 personal AI agent running on Google Cloud, rolling out to trusted testers this week and beta for Google AI Ultra subscribers in the U.S. next week. New infrastructure includes TPU 8t and 8i, the eighth-generation tensor processing units, offering nearly three times the raw computing power for training and optimized inference. AI Overviews now has 2.5 billion monthly active users, and the Gemini app surpassed 900 million monthly active users. Other announcements include Ask YouTube, Docs Live voice capabilities, Google Pics image editing tool, and information agents in Search. SynthID watermarking has been adopted by OpenAI, Kakao, and Eleven Labs. Gemini 3.5 Pro is expected next month. The company's annual capex is projected at $180-190 billion, up from $31 billion in 2022.