Google's Nano Banana 2 takes aim at the production cost problem that's kept AI image gen out of enterprise workflows

For the last six months, enterprises wanting to deploy high quality AI image generation at scale have faced an uncomfortable trade-off: pay premium prices for Google's Nano Banana Pro model, or settle for cheaper (sometimes free), faster, but noticeably inferior alternatives — especially in terms of enterprise requirements like embedded accurate text, slides, diagrams, and other non aesthetic information. Today, Google DeepMind is attempting to collapse that gap with the launch of Nano Banana 2 (formally Gemini 3.1 Flash Image) — a model that brings the reasoning, text rendering, and creative control of the Pro tier down to Flash-level speed and pricing. The release comes just sixteen days after Alibaba's Qwen team dropped Qwen-Image-2.0, a 7-billion parameter open-weight challenger that m