Google wants $250 (!) per month for its new AI Ultra plan

Google has just announced a new $250 per month AI Ultra plan for people who want unlimited access to its most advanced machine learning features. Yes, you read that right. It means the new subscription is $50 more expensive than the already pricey ChatGPT Pro and Claude Max plans from OpenAI and Anthropic.

For $250, you’re getting early access to new models like Veo 3, and unlimited usage of features like Flow (the new AI film-making app the company announced today) and the compute-intensive Deep Research. In the coming weeks, Google will also roll out Deep Think to AI Ultra users, which is the new enhanced reasoning mode that is part of its Gemini 2.5 Pro model. Subscribers can also look forward to access to Project Mariner, Google’s web-surfing agent, and Gemini within Chrome, plus all the usual places where you can find the chatbot like Gmail and Docs.

Google is partly justifying the high cost of AI Ultra by touting the inclusion of YouTube Premium and 30TB of cloud storage across Google Photos, Drive and Gmail. On its own, a YouTube Premium subscription would cost you $14 per month, and Google doesn’t offer 30TB of cloud storage separately. The closest comparison would be Google One, which includes a Premium tier that comes with 2TB of storage for $10 per month. As another incentive to sign up for AI Ultra, Google is giving new subscribers 50 percent off their first three months.

As of today, Google is also revamping its existing AI Premium plan. The subscription, which will be known as Google AI Pro moving forward, now includes the Flow app and early access to Gemini in Chrome. Google says the new benefits will come to US subscribers first, with availability in other countries to follow.