Google rolls out Gemini 4 Hydrogen to app, API and Search

Google Alphabet Inc. ↗ 2.49% released Gemini 4 Hydrogen on Thursday, November 12. It is a fast, lower-cost model that the company says brings "cutting-edge intelligence to everyone — with speed and efficiency for everyday coding and agentic workflows," according to Google's announcement. Hydrogen takes the slot previously held by Google's Flash models. The company is rolling it out at once to the Gemini app, the Gemini API, Google AI Studio, Gemini for business, Google Search and Google Antigravity. That came just two days after Gemini 4 Carbon arrived on November 10.blog.google

Benchmarks, speed and price

At its default "high" thinking level, Hydrogen scores 51 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, one point above Gemini 4 Argon's 50, Google says. At the top "xhigh" setting it reaches 54, 9to5Google reported. Google says Hydrogen finishes tasks 2.5 times faster than Gemini 3.8 Flash, which launched on September 2. It also says Hydrogen more than triples 3.8 Flash's Terminal-Bench 4.1 score (57% vs. 18.2%) and makes more than five times fewer fabricated claims, according to 9to5Google. The model accepts up to 1 million tokens of input and can produce up to 1 million output tokens.9to5google.com

The price is a flat $1.50 per million input tokens and $7.50 per million output tokens across the full context window, Google said. Before the launch, FourWeekMBA reported that the same rates had already shown up in Google Cloud's public billing catalogue. Business Insider had earlier reported that Google staff were testing the model internally.fourweekmba.com+1

On the developer side, Google says Hydrogen can handle repository coding, debugging and multimodal work. It can run alone at four configurable thinking levels or alongside Carbon and Argon, according to Google's developer blog.blog.google

Search, the Gemini app and Antigravity

In Search, Hydrogen is now the default model in AI Mode and will handle the hardest questions in AI Overviews, Google's Robby Stein wrote. Nick Fox called it "the biggest model improvement to Search yet," Search Engine Roundtable reported. Google says Search will now handle multi-part questions better, link to more sites through query fan-out and give more visual answers.seroundtable.com

In the Gemini app, Hydrogen appears in the model picker as the "Everyday help" option. Free users get it through automatic model selection when it suits the prompt, 9to5Google noted. XDA Developers said Hydrogen had already replaced Flash in its own model picker.xda-developers.com+1

In Antigravity, which is available to paid Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers, Google added a feature called Orchestrator. Rather than using one model for a whole session, it "dynamically switches between models like Carbon and Hydrogen within the same session." Carbon can act as the coordinator while Hydrogen runs the worker and verifier agents, "helping teams ship complex projects faster without driving up token costs," Google said.9to5google.com