Google opens Gemini 4 Argon to everyone, at a discount
Five weeks after announcing Gemini 4 Argon and shipping it only to vetted cyber defenders, Google has made its flagship model broadly available. Developers get it on the paid Gemini API tier in AI Studio, enterprises through Gemini for business, and Pro and Ultra subscribers in the Gemini app and AI Mode in Search. The headline is price: $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output until November 30, doubling to $4 and $20 on December 1, with a unified 1M-token budget covering input and output. That undercuts several rival flagships per token, though per-task cost depends on how many tokens a model burns. For anyone choosing a frontier API this quarter, Argon is now the one to benchmark against. Google's announcement · API pricing
What else matters
Microsoft makes its own Maia chip its main inference system
Microsoft says it will scale Azure Maia to multi-gigawatt deployments from 2027, making it the primary inference platform for its products. Maia 300, the third generation, targets 40% more tokens per megawatt than leading GPU systems and up to 7x Maia 200's rack throughput. Maia 200 already serves Copilot. Microsoft blog
Nvidia takes stakes in four French AI startups
On a Paris visit, Jensen Huang announced minority investments in Genesis AI, Pigment, Entalpic and Doctolib, with terms undisclosed. Nvidia says it has put about $8 billion into European tech and AI over the past year and plans roughly $2 billion more in commitments this week, alongside large Blackwell GPU deployments. Particle summary
Fish Audio ships open-weight Drama 3 and raises $52M
Voice startup Fish Audio released Drama 3, an open-weight text-to-speech model with word-level emotion control and mid-sentence voice switching, with day-one serving support from SGLang. It also announced a $52 million seed round and says it has passed 15 million users. Release coverage
Ubitium raises $14M for a universal processor for physical AI
Düsseldorf chip startup Ubitium raised a $14 million seed round led by Ibex Investors, taking total seed funding to $18 million. It is building reconfigurable silicon meant to replace the stack of separate chips robots and sensing systems use today, with early customers in radar. Ubitium announcement
