Google is offering its Gemini Advanced subscription plan to college students in the US for a year to compete with OpenAI's ChatGPT Plus offer.
Students will get access to Google's latest Gemini 2.5 Pro model
Photo Credit: Google
Gemini Advanced — the AI service that's bundled with the Google One AI Premium plan — will be free for a year for college students in the US. Students can now claim 15 months of access to Gemini Advanced, as the company seeks to compete with rival OpenAI's recent decision to provide two months of ChatGPT Plus for students in the US. As part of the promotion, users will also have access to 2TB of storage for Google products on their personal account, along with other Gemini AI features.
According to details on a microsite on the Google Gemini website, the company will allow users to claim free access to Gemini Advanced for a 15-month period. Users who live in the country and are enrolled at a college can avail of the offer until June 30.
If a student has already subscribed to Google One AI Premium, they will need to cancel their subscription and claim the offer after the current billing cycle. Google charges US customers around $20 (roughly Rs. 1,700) per month for a Google One AI Premium subscription.
In order to claim the free Google One AI Premium offer, students must have an email address that ends with '.edu'. These email addresses are granted by colleges in the US, which is how Google is verifying that a user is eligible for the promotion.
Students who avail of the offer will gain access to Gemini Advanced (with Gemini 2.5 Pro), Notebook LM Plus (research), Whisk (image and animation generation), and Veo 2 (video generation). They will also get access to Gemini features across Google Workspace apps.
These benefits, along with the 2TB of cloud storage, will be activated on a user's personal Google account after they have signed up and claimed the offer using the email address provided by their college. These tools will remain available until "spring 2026", according to the company.
Google's rival OpenAI recently announced that students in the US and Canada could sign up for free access to ChatGPT Plus for two months, as part of a limited promotion. In comparison with OpenAI's offer, Google offers access to Gemini advanced for a much longer duration, but is only accessible to students in the US.
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