Google is reportedly paying a significant amount of money to keep the search giant’s Gemini AI chatbot as the default option on Samsung’s devices.
The details come from court documents and testimony from the ongoing antitrust case between the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and Google.
According to Bloomberg, court documents show that Google is paying Samsung “an enormous” amount of money on a monthly basis to keep its Gemini app as the preferred AI chatbot on Samsung devices and other smartphones.
The payments to Samsung began in January 2025, according to testimony from Peter Fitzgerald, Google’s vice president of platforms and device partnerships. Fitzgerald stated that Google would pay Samsung monthly for at least two years, and those monthly payments would be a set amount for each device that would have Gemini pre-installed. This also included a percentage of revenue that Google generated from advertisements inside the Gemini app.
Gemini isn’t the only thing Google is paying to get on Android devices. The company is also paying Samsung to make its Chrome browser the default on the company’s smartphones. We also learned during the Epic Games trial that Google paid Samsung US$8 billion to make the Play Store and Google Assistant default options on Samsung devices between 2020 and 2023.
Google Messages was made the default messaging app on Samsung devices in 2024, but it’s not clear whether Google is paying Samsung for that too.
Google has a track record of paying to secure its position as the default on other companies’ devices. For example, Google was paying Apple as much as US$20 billion (roughly C$25.5 billion) in 2022 alone, making up approximately 16 per cent of Apple’s entire operating income, just to keep its search product as the default on the company’s devices.
Source: Bloomberg
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