In sum – what we know:
- Five-year deal – Google Cloud and Liberty Global announced a partnership covering AI deployment, customer service automation, and more.
- Gemini AI – Liberty Global will integrate Google’s Gemini AI models into both internal operations and consumer-facing services.
- Broader expansion – The partnership extends to Google Pixel devices and smart home products sold through Liberty Global’s operating units.
Google Cloud and Liberty Global have announced a five-year strategic partnership that puts Google’s Gemini AI models at the center of the European telecom operator’s digital solutions. The deal spans AI deployment, Google hardware distribution, network automation, and small business services — touching Liberty Global’s roughly 80 million fixed and mobile connections across operating companies like Virgin Media O2 in the UK, Telenet in Belgium, VodafoneZiggo in the Netherlands, and Sunrise in Switzerland.
This kind of hyperscaler-telco tie-up is becoming increasingly common as operators hunt for ways to modernize aging infrastructure and find fresh revenue. What makes this one stand out is its sheer breadth — it reaches from customer service chatbots all the way to data center capacity sharing to Pixel phones sitting on retail shelves, in a series of different countries.
Gemini AI and what it actually brings
At the heart of the deal is Liberty Global’s commitment to weaving Google’s Gemini AI models into both consumer-facing products and internal operations. On the consumer side, that translates to AI-powered search and content discovery on the Horizon TV platform, with the goal of making entertainment recommendations feel more personal. Behind the scenes, Gemini is expected to automate workflows and sharpen decision-making across Liberty Global’s European footprint.
Obviously Gemini is only one part of the broader deal between the two companies, but perhaps not even a main part of the deal. But, we have been seeing other deals between telcos and AI providers like OpenAI — which begs the question: does Gemini actually offer something meaningfully distinct from OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude in this context? Jordan Stefanov, Telecoms, Media & Technology Director at global consultancy Baringa, thinks it does — at least structurally.
“Gemini differentiates itself by being natively multimodal from the ground up, able to reason seamlessly across text, audio, images, video, and code rather than relying on stitched-together models,” Stefanov said. He also highlighted how tightly it fits into Google’s broader product universe: “Its native fit with Android extends Gemini’s reach directly onto billions of smartphones, TVs, routers, and smart-home devices, embedding AI at the point of daily consumer interaction.”
Still, Stefanov didn’t sugarcoat the limits of model-level differentiation. “At the model level, LLMs are rapidly commoditizing. ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini are all ‘good enough’ for many core telco use cases such as agent assist, knowledge search, and customer analytics,” he noted. His point was that the real competitive moat isn’t the model itself — it’s how deeply the model plugs into the operating environment. Device access, network data, latency, security — these matter far more than the underlying engine.
Kerem Bolukbasi, CEO of wireless connectivity company Wifinium, argues there’s more of an ecosystem play. “Other LLMs could be used in the telco space but all of the Google tools together provide an ecosystem more like what Apple has done within its ecosystem, which is a big advantage,” Bolukbasi said. He also flagged something easy to overlook: Google’s two-decade head start in amassing search data gives Gemini a knowledge foundation that competitors can’t easily replicate.
Originally written by: Christian de Looper
Source: RCR Wireless News
Published on: 9 February 2026
Link to original article: Google Cloud and Liberty Global sign 5 year deal
