Google said it will provide U.S. colleges and universities with $1 billion worth of artificial intelligence education and job training tools, the company announced Wednesday.
The three-year commitment will also make the programs available to non-profits, free of cost, Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and its parent company Alphabet, said in a blog post.
So far, the tech giant says it has partnered with more than 100 public universities, including Texas A&M and the University of North Carolina. All accredited, non-profit colleges and universities in the U.S. are eligible for the partnership.
The push comes as the world’s biggest tech companies, including Microsoft and Meta, are vying for dominance in the AI space. At the same time, some corporate leaders have predicted that generative artificial intelligence could allow their businesses to trim their human workforce due to the tech’s productivity gains.
Future professionals must become fluent in AI to succeed professionally, as more companies lean on new AI tools to improve efficiency, Google’s Pichai wrote.
“Knowing how to use this technology will also serve these students well as they transition to the world of work,” Pichai said.
Through Google’s “Career Certificates,” the company will offer free AI training to all U.S. college students. The certificates are described as “flexible online training programs, designed to put you on the fast track to jobs in high-paying fields, now including practical AI training,” according to Google’s website.
Google identified the current generation of students as the first cohort of “AI natives” who will eventually use the tech in ways that have yet to be discovered.
Here’s what students can access
All college students can sign up for a 12-month Google AI Pro plan, which gives them:
Access to Gemini 2.5 Pro, Google’s most advanced AI model which it says is a “thinking” model that is “capable of reasoning.” For students’ benefit, it “provides quick homework and writing help,” according to GoogleDeep Research: The tool can compose custom research reports, based on information from the internet NotebookLM: The “thinking companion” can help students organize their thoughts, according to GoogleVeo 3 can transform text or an image into a short videoExpanded access to Jules, an AI coding agent
Learning to master AI tools could help college students find a foothold in the workforce at a time when some companies are scaling back their plans to hire new grads, with some experts blaming AI for the reduction. Recent data from career platform Handshake shows that listings for entry-level jobs were down 15% over the past year.
A report from outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas also shows that employers attributed at least 10,000 job cuts from the beginning of the year through July explicitly to AI. They cut another 20,000 positions for other reasons related to technological innovation, the report found.
