Google ships Gemini 4 Hydrogen as the new default fast model across its AI products
Google has released Gemini 4 Hydrogen, a faster Gemini 4 model that takes over from Gemini 3.8 Flash in the Gemini app, Google Search, AI Studio and the Gemini API.
Google announced Gemini 4 Hydrogen on November 12, 2026. In its launch post, Google pitches the model as the speed-focused member of the Gemini 4 family, meant for everyday coding and agent work, while the larger Gemini 4 Carbon and Argon models remain its picks for long, difficult reasoning. Ars Technica reports that Hydrogen has replaced Gemini 3.8 Flash across Google's products.
What's new
- Where it runs: Google says Hydrogen is rolling out worldwide in the Gemini app, Google Search, the Gemini API, Google AI Studio and Gemini for business. Paid Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers can also use it in Google Antigravity.
- Thinking levels: the model offers four settings, low, medium, high (the default) and a new xhigh, so users can trade answer quality against speed and cost.
- Speed and scores: Google claims Hydrogen finishes tasks 2.5 times faster than Gemini 3.8 Flash. On the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, Google reports a score of 51 at the default level and 54 at xhigh, against 50 for Argon.
- Search: in a separate post, Google calls Hydrogen the biggest model upgrade to Search so far, with better handling of long, multi-part questions and more tables and visual answers.
- Free Gemini app users: according to Google's footnote, they reach Hydrogen through automatic model selection when the system judges it suitable for a prompt.
Availability and pricing
Google lists API pricing of $1.50 for every million input tokens and $7.50 for every million output tokens, at the same rate across a 1 million-token context window. Ars Technica notes that this matches what Gemini 3.8 Flash cost.
Why it matters
Analysis: the fast tier is the model most people actually meet, in search results, chat apps and cheap API calls, so a change here reaches far more users than a new flagship does. Keeping the API price unchanged makes switching an easy decision for developers already on the Flash tier. Google's benchmark figures are its own, though, and teams should test Hydrogen on their real workloads before moving production traffic over.
Source: Google