Inside the Gemmaverse: Celebrating one billion Gemma downloads

Aug 20, 2026

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From outer space to underwater, here's how developers are bringing a positive impact with our open models.


Clement Farabet

Vice President, Google DeepMind

Olivier Lacombe

Product Director, Google DeepMind


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When we introduced Gemma, our goal was simple: empower developers to build responsible, innovative AI applications anywhere. The Gemma models quickly demonstrated their flexibility to deploy across environments, from local devices to edge infrastructure, and even space. Today, the Gemma family has surpassed a billion downloads.

What matters far more than the download count is what the community is building with them. Over the past two years, developers have published over one-hundred thousand Gemma model variants and built a thriving ecosystem of innovation we call the Gemmaverse.

Here is a look at how the Gemmaverse is making an impact at the edge, across the globe, and beyond.

Taking Gemma models to the stars

Gemma has officially gone extraterrestrial. Teams at NASA, Satlyt, and Starcloud are running Gemma directly in orbit, powering onboard image analysis, optimizing scarce downlink bandwidth, and routing intersatellite communications. Together, they prove Gemma can deliver complex reasoning in some of the most constrained and extreme environments imaginable.

Empowering 100 million citizens in India

Back on Earth, India's National Health Authority (NHA) integrated Gemma 4 and the Google open-source Medical Data Toolkit into Aarogya Setu 2.0, an app with over 100 million downloads on Android. By using Gemma 4 to process complex medical reports into standardized digital formats, the app helps citizens manage and securely share their health data across providers. This capability demonstrates how developers can deploy our open models to handle critical information at a massive scale.

Pioneering breakthroughs in medicine

Researchers from Yale and Google built C2S-Scale, a powerful AI model designed to interpret the “language” of single cells. Built on Gemma, C2S-Scale successfully discovered a novel cancer therapy pathway that was verified in living cells. This research marks the first time an AI system produced novel mechanistic therapeutic pathways that were verified in living cells.

Beyond specialized research, our domain-specific medical model, MedGemma, is helping developers accelerate the development of their healthcare applications, from improving workflow management and patient communication to diagnostic and treatment support. Today, MedGemma is being used by organizations across the world to develop their real-world clinical applications, like supporting outpatient triage at the All India Institute of Medical Science (AIIMS) to creating systems that support frontline health workers in rural Uganda.

Decoding interspecies communication

Gemma is even making waves underwater. In a collaboration with Georgia Tech and the Wild Dolphin Project, researchers developed DolphinGemma. This specialized AI model processes complex dolphin vocalizations to predict sound sequences. Researchers are actively iterating on this complex challenge, and it’s just the beginning. So stay tuned for much more to come from under the sea.

Driving AI for good

At the heart of the Gemmaverse is a commitment to positive impact. Last year, we highlighted how developers are changing lives with Gemma, building everything from AI assistants for the visually impaired to offline educational hubs for disconnected regions. This momentum has only grown with the recent Gemma Challenge on Kaggle, where the community submitted over 1600 projects aimed at solving real-world problems. We will announce the winners very soon!

Introducing the "Awesome Gemma" GitHub repository

Finally, with over 1 billion downloads and so many projects being built every day, we want to help the community to share, discover, and collaborate. That’s why we are launching the Awesome Gemma repository on GitHub.

This curated repository will serve as the official directory for the Gemmaverse and feature the best community projects, fine-tunes, tutorials, and developer tools.

Whether you’re creating the next big app, optimizing models for spaceflight, or just starting your AI journey, the Awesome Gemma repository is your launchpad. Check it out and show us what you're building!