New to this? Read it in simple words
- Google released Gemini 4 Hydrogen, a fast model for everyday work, on November 12.
- It costs $1.50 per million input tokens and $7.50 per million output tokens.
- An independent testing firm scores it 51, just above the bigger Gemini 4 Argon at 50.
- Google says it is 2.5 times faster than Gemini 3.8 Flash, but nobody outside has checked that.
- Token
- A small piece of text, about part of a word, that AI models read and write and charge for.
- Thinking level
- A setting for how long a model reasons before it answers. More thinking costs more and takes longer.
- Median
- The middle value: half of the compared models score higher, and half score lower.
Google’s Gemini 4 family now has three models. Carbon is the strongest, Argon came first, and Hydrogen is built for quick, everyday work. Google says Hydrogen is “built for rapid execution across diverse agentic workflows”.
Where it is available
Google released Hydrogen on November 12 and says it is rolling out globally. It is in Google AI Studio, the Gemini API, Gemini for business, the Gemini app and Google Search.
In Antigravity, Google’s coding app, it is for paying Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers. Hydrogen has four thinking levels: low, medium, high and a new “xhigh”. High is the default.
Scores from Artificial Analysis. Price from Google.
The price
Hydrogen costs $1.50 per million input tokens and $7.50 per million output tokens. Google says the price is the same across its whole window of about 1 million tokens, which input and output share.
VentureBeat calls it a “pricier” successor to Gemini 3.8 Flash. Google says Hydrogen is a “major standalone upgrade” for teams moving from Flash.
What the outside test shows
Artificial Analysis runs its own Intelligence Index, a set of nine tests of reasoning, coding and agent work. It scores Hydrogen 51 at the default high setting and 54 at the highest, xhigh.
Gemini 4 Argon scores 50 on the same index, and Gemini 4 Carbon, Google’s strongest model, scores 60. The median for comparable models is 41.
On average, one task in the index cost $1.87 at the high setting and $3.16 at xhigh. At high, Hydrogen used 110 million tokens on the tests, against a median of 72.8 million. The firm calls that “somewhat verbose”.
What Google claims
Google says Hydrogen finishes tasks 2.5 times faster than Gemini 3.8 Flash at the high setting. It says Hydrogen scores 57% on Terminal-Bench 4.1, a coding test, against 18.2% for Flash.
Google also says Hydrogen cuts made-up claims by more than five times. Partners testing it saw it run 2 to 2.8 times faster than Flash, with 12% to 23% fewer tokens, Google says.
Orchestrator in Antigravity
Orchestrator switches between models such as Carbon and Hydrogen within one coding session, instead of using one model from start to finish. Google wants the big models for hard design decisions and Hydrogen for writing and testing code.
On Terminal-Bench 4.0, Google says, Orchestrator came close to Carbon’s success rate while using 24% less quota and finishing 19% faster.
Sources
Every fact in this story comes from the sources below. Open them to check our work.
- 1
- 2
- 3Research · November 12, 2026Gemini 4 Hydrogen (High): Intelligence, Performance and Price Analysis Artificial Analysis
- 4Research · November 12, 2026Google launches Gemini 4 Hydrogen — a faster, smarter, pricier Flash successor VentureBeat
- 5Research · November 12, 2026Google releases Gemini 4 Hydrogen, a lower-cost model said to outscore Argon SiliconANGLE
- 6Research · November 12, 2026Google’s Gemini 4 Hydrogen outscores the bigger Argon just four weeks after its launch The Decoder
The scores of 51, 54, 50 and 60 come from Artificial Analysis’s own tests. Google’s speed, accuracy and Orchestrator figures are its own, and no outside group has checked them yet.
Google’s Gemini 4 Hydrogen beats Argon on an outside test. Silicon AI News, November 13, 2026. https://siliconainews.com/stories/google-gemini-4-hydrogen-launch
Google’s new fast model scored above its bigger Argon model on an independent test, though it costs more than Flash. How we rate the mood
The mood shows how the news frames the event for the tech and AI world: as an opportunity (6 and above) or as a loss (below 5). It is not our verdict on who is right.