Google has signed Jimmy Donaldson, the YouTuber known as MrBeast, to a multi-year partnership that extends the company’s relationship with him beyond YouTube into Gemini and Google Health, according to the company’s blog post.

The first activation arrives September 5 with a MrBeast video in which he and his crew attempt to survive three “unforgiving” climates: the jungle, the desert and the Arctic, using Gemini to help identify hazards, respond to weather changes, and navigate the environments. Donaldson will also be the face of Google’s newly launched Gemini advertising campaign, showing how he uses the app “as a partner to help him pull off the logistics of his signature, larger-than-life stunts,” and will integrate Fitbit Air into a future challenge to highlight fitness and wellness tracking.

Google’s post frames the deal around Donaldson’s status as the first individual creator to reach 500 million YouTube subscribers. The tech giant said it is tapping that reach to show fans “how they can use AI to help turn impossibly big ideas into reality.”

A Reversal From Earlier AI Concerns

The partnership comes nearly a year after Donaldson publicly called the pace of generative AI “scary” for creators. In an October 2025 post on X, he asked what would happen to people like him “when AI videos are just as good as normal videos.” Donaldson, however, had already tested AI in his own operation, releasing an AI thumbnail-generation tool earlier in 2025 that he pulled after other creators objected to the underlying training data.

Google’s Veo video generator, which the company has separately confirmed is trained in part on YouTube content, is not mentioned in the latest blog post, and Google has not disclosed whether Donaldson’s videos are part of that training set.

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