Google on Thursday rolled out Nano Banana Pro, its latest image editing and generation tool, continuing the company’s momentum after launching its new Gemini artificial intelligence model earlier this week.

The product is built on Gemini 3 Pro, which was announced on Tuesday and contributed to record-breaking stock highs.

Alphabet’s stock was up 4% Thursday.

Josh Woodward, vice president of Google Labs and Gemini, told CNBC’s Deirdre Bosa that the Nano Banana Pro’s capabilities expand beyond its original iteration, which launched in late August.

“It’s incredible at infographics. It can make slide decks. It can take up to 14 different images, or five different characters, and sort of keep that character consistency,” he said.

He added that internal users have experimented with the feature by inputting code snippets and even LinkedIn resumes to create infographics.

“I think this ability to visualize things that were previously maybe not something you would think of as a visual medium that tends to be one of the magic things people are finding with it,” Woodward said.

The original Nano Banana went viral on social media as users turned photos of themselves or their pets into hyperrealistic 3D figurines. Woodward wrote in an X post in September that the product helped add 13 million new users to the Gemini app in the span of four days.

Nano Banana Pro is currently available in the Gemini app, with limited free quotas, Google’s writing assistant, NotebookLM, as well as the company’s developer, enterprise and advertising products.

Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers will have access to the product in Google’s search features AI Mode.

The feature will later also roll out to Ultra subscribers first in Flow, Google’s AI filmmaking tool.

Google introduced another feature in the Gemini app that allows users to upload any image to find out if it was generated by Google AI.

Images generated on free Nano Banana accounts will have a watermark, but it will be removed for Google AI Ultra tier subscribers.

Google has been working to gain ground on OpenAI in the generative AI race, which ignited after the release of ChatGPT in 2022.

Last week, OpenAI announced two updates to its GPT-5 model to make it “warmer by default and more conversational” as well as ” more efficient and easier to understand in everyday use,” the company said.

ChatGPT currently tops the list of free apps on Apple’s App Store, with Gemini in the second spot.

The Gemini app currently has over 650 million monthly active users per month, and Gemini-powered AI Overviews has 2 billion monthly users, Google said in a release. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in October that ChatGPT had reached 800 million weekly active users.

Woodward said Google AI products have had growing demand, with many users signing up for Gemini’s subscription plan to have “higher limits with some of these advanced models.”

“We’re seeing high numbers of people coming to lots of these products,” he said. “That’s really the best problem to have, is there’s a lot of demand, and we’re trying to figure out actually how to serve it.”

The company is looking to continue scaling its AI offerings, Woodward said, highlighting Flow, Google’s AI filmmaking tool, and Genie, a “world building” model that is currently available as a limited research preview.

The U.S. has approved sales of advanced Nvidia chips to Saudi Arabia’s HUMAIN and the United Arab Emirates’ G42, authorizing the state-backed firms to buy up to 35,000 chips, worth an estimated $1 billion.

The approval of these chip exports marks a major reversal for the U.S., which had previously balked at the idea of direct exports to state-backed AI companies in the Gulf. Export controls were put into place to avoid advanced American technology making its way to China through the back door of Gulf Arab states.  

Before former President Joe Biden left office in January, he administered a final round of export restrictions on advanced AI chips, targeting companies like Nvidia, in a sweeping effort to keep that cutting-edge U.S. intellectual property out of China’s reach.

Now, President Donald Trump is moving to expand the reach of such advanced technology in order to “promote continued American AI dominance and global technological leadership,” the U.S. Commerce Department said in a statement published on Wednesday. 

The U.S. Commerce Department approved the chip exports, with the condition the state-backed AI outfits agree to “rigorous security and reporting requirements,” overseen by the Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security.

The export approval follows Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s trip to Washington this week where the Kingdom pledged to spend $1 trillion in the U.S., up from $600 billion originally committed during Trump’s Gulf tour in May.

“Even if we don’t get to that, both sides have skin in the game,” Afshin Molavi, senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute of the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, told CNBC’s Dan Murphy.

Saudi Arabia’s AI company HUMAIN, backed by its nearly $1 trillion Public Investment Fund signed a long list of partnerships with Adobe, Qualcomm, AMD, Cisco, GlobalAI, Groq, Luma, and xAI at a U.S.-Saudi Investment Forum held in Washington, D.C this week. Notably, HUMAIN will be teaming up with Elon Musk’s xAI to build a 500 megawatt data center in the Kingdom.

“What we want to do in 2026 is to build the capacity equivalent to what Saudi has built in the last 20 years, in one year,” Tareq Amin, CEO of HUMAIN, said at the summit. HUMAIN is hoping to position Saudi Arabia as the third biggest global AI hub, after the likes of the U.S. and China.

Just two weeks ago, Microsoft secured an export license for advanced chips to the UAE. Microsoft’s key partner in the UAE is G42, but the local AI company was notably absent from the Microsoft announcement, until today.