Is Google planning to charge for its services?

Global tech behemoth Google is used worldwide as a free-of-cost search engine, but for using artificial intelligence-enhanced features, it is planning to charge money, reported Financial Times.

The premium subscription would allow the users to benefit from its generative AI features as global competition to lead the technology race continues to challenge the dominant players of the game.

The major challenge to the dominant platforms was posed by the Microsoft-backed tech start-up OpenAI that created ChatGPT.

Alphabet's Google is currently charging for using Gemini AI in Gmail services. 

The current plans are for the first time the tech giant has proposed to charge money for its core services.

In a statement to Reuters, Google said: "We're not working on or considering an ad-free search experience. As we've done many times before, we'll continue to build new premium capabilities and services to enhance our subscription offerings across Google."

Google — which was founded in Menlo Park in 1998 — is among the other leaders in the industry that were shaken from their foundations after the rise of AGI.

Microsoft and its ChatGPT maker revealed last week to establish a $100bn datacenter for AI training.

In January the founder of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg also expressed his plans to spend $9bn just on Nvidia GPUs.