Google released Nano Banana 2.1, an updated image-generation model, into production on October 6, 2026, making it live across the Gemini app, Google AI Studio, AI Mode in Search, and other Google platforms. The release came with an aggressive pricing move: Google halved image output pricing to $30 per million tokens, well below OpenAI's competing GPT Image 2.5.
The pricing cut is as notable as the model itself. Image generation has become a genuine cost center for consumer AI products, and Google's willingness to cut prices in half signals it's treating image generation as a volume business rather than a premium feature, a pattern increasingly common as the major labs compete on unit economics as much as raw model quality.