Google’s recent launch of Gemini 3, coupled with its aggressive push into AI chips, is reshaping the competitive landscape in artificial intelligence.
According to reports, the tech giant’s new agentic platform is quickly catching up with OpenAI’s ChatGPT in monthly app downloads and surpasses the rival in average time spent per visit. Analysts suggest that Google may be well-positioned to “close the gap” with OpenAI, which faces challenges tied to its rapid expansion, including rising cloud infrastructure costs.
HSBC Global Investment Research estimates that OpenAI may require around $207 billion in additional funding by 2030 to sustain its growth trajectory. The bank attributes this potential shortfall to massive cloud and data-center investments that exceed anticipated cash generation, even under strong revenue scenarios. HSBC projects that OpenAI’s cloud and AI infrastructure spending could reach roughly $792 billion between late 2025 and 2030, and approximately $1.4 trillion by 2033.
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In line with this, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has reportedly warned staff that the coming months may be challenging as competition intensifies from Google and other AI players. In a memo, Altman noted that Google’s latest announcements, especially its advanced AI systems including Gemini 3.0, have altered the sector’s competitive dynamics. These developments, he explained, have accelerated the pace of innovation and raised the benchmark for advanced AI research.
Since the inception of the Gemini era nearly two years ago, Google has described it as one of its largest scientific and product endeavors. Last month, the company unveiled Gemini 3 in AI Mode in Search, introducing more complex reasoning and dynamic experiences. Gemini was designed from the outset to synthesize information across multiple modalities, including text, images, video, audio, and code.
Gemini 3 advances multimodal reasoning to help users learn and interact with information intuitively, combining state-of-the-art reasoning, vision and spatial understanding, multilingual performance, and a 1 million-token context window.
The platform’s Deep Think mode pushes intelligence even further, enhancing reasoning and multimodal comprehension to solve increasingly complex problems. Through advanced reasoning, tool use, and agentic coding capabilities, Google Antigravity transforms AI assistance from a simple tool into an active collaborator, integrating directly with editors, terminals, and browsers in a familiar AI IDE environment.
Industry observers note that AI models have consistently doubled in capability every six months over the past three years. OpenAI, in turn, issued updates to GPT-5 last month, highlighting improvements in intelligence, instruction-following, speed on simple tasks, and persistence on complex ones. While OpenAI’s latest models remain highly competitive, Google claims that Gemini 3, especially paired with the Nano Banana 2 Pro, will drive productivity gains beyond any prior AI system.
According to Google, the Gemini app now boasts 650 million monthly active users, while AI Overviews reaches 2 billion monthly users. OpenAI reported in August that ChatGPT had reached 700 million weekly users.
Outlook
The launch of Google’s Gemini 3 marks a pivotal moment in the global AI race, signaling that competition in advanced artificial intelligence is accelerating at an unprecedented pace. With Gemini 3’s multimodal reasoning, Deep Think capabilities, and agentic tools, Google is not only matching OpenAI in user engagement but also setting new benchmarks for AI productivity and intelligence.
In the broader market, the next two years will likely see a consolidation of AI platforms around those that can deliver superior intelligence, scalability, and usability while managing operational costs effectively.