Mountain View, California, United States
$3.86T
VALUATION
Technology company
On December 17, 2025, Google introduced Gemini 3 Flash and made it the default model for AI Mode in Search and the Gemini app worldwide. The lighter, faster model is also now available to developers and enterprises via the Gemini API, Vertex AI, AI Studio and related Google Cloud services.
The Costa Rica News reports that Brazil, Mexico, Chile, Colombia and Argentina are in the midst of a major data‑center construction wave, driven by 5G rollouts, cloud adoption and the compute‑hungry rise of AI workloads. ([thecostaricanews.com](https://thecostaricanews.com/latin-america-accelerates-data-center-construction-in-response-to-the-advance-of-5g/)) Brazil leads the region with 195 data‑center projects, backed by a mostly renewable power mix but hampered by taxes and high energy costs; the government is offering incentives tied to green energy use and R&D spending to lure more AI infrastructure. ([thecostaricanews.com](https://thecostaricanews.com/latin-america-accelerates-data-center-construction-in-response-to-the-advance-of-5g/)) The piece highlights eye‑popping commitments such as TikTok’s US$37.7 billion data‑center investment in Brazil’s Pecém complex, AWS’s more than US$5 billion "Mexico Central" region, and multi‑billion‑dollar cloud regions from Microsoft and AWS in Chile, along with an OpenAI‑linked US$25 billion project that will test the limits of local grids. ([thecostaricanews.com](https://thecostaricanews.com/latin-america-accelerates-data-center-construction-in-response-to-the-advance-of-5g/)) Environmental groups are already warning about the water and energy footprint of these hyperscale sites, and the article stresses that regulatory certainty, faster permitting and access to renewables will determine which countries capture the next wave of AI data‑center capital.
Google’s Australia blog reports that Telstra’s "Free Calls to Santa" hotline is back, letting children dial a special code from more than 14,000 payphones across Australia to speak with an AI-powered Santa. Behind the scenes, the experience uses Google Cloud’s Customer Engagement Suite and Gemini with a custom Santa voice plus strong guardrails and prompt design to generate unique, real‑time and age‑appropriate conversations, illustrating a playful but large-scale deployment of generative AI in consumer telecom services.