Google
Google LLC is an American multinational technology corporation and a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc., specializing in internet services, online advertising, cloud computing, software, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. Founded in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were PhD students at Stanford University, the company grew from a research project into one of the world's most valuable companies with a market capitalization exceeding $4.5 trillion by mid-2026. Google's core products include Search, Android, YouTube, Chrome, Gmail, Google Maps, and Google Cloud, with over a dozen services each serving more than one billion users.
In 2025, Alphabet posted record annual revenue of approximately $403 billion, with Google Cloud emerging as the fastest-growing segment. The Gemini AI model family became the company's central product strategy, reaching over 950 million monthly active users by July 2026 and being integrated across Search, Cloud, Workspace, and consumer devices. Gmail surpassed 3 billion users, joining Search, Android, Chrome, and YouTube in that tier. Google I/O 2026 marked a strategic pivot toward agentic AI, with the launch of Gemini 3.5 Flash, the Gemini Omni world model, the persistent Gemini Spark personal agent, the Antigravity 2.0 multi-agent orchestration platform, and the Googlebook line of AI-native laptops.
The first half of 2026 saw significant financial and regulatory developments. Alphabet undertook the largest equity raise in corporate history at $84.75 billion to fund AI infrastructure, joined the Dow Jones Industrial Average on June 29, 2026, and entered a $30 billion cloud computing agreement with SpaceX for GPU capacity. In Q2 2026, Alphabet reported revenue of $119.8 billion (up 24 percent year-over-year) with Google Cloud surging 82 percent to $24.8 billion and a cloud backlog reaching $514 billion, though capital expenditures of $44.9 billion pushed free cash flow negative for the first time since the 2004 IPO, and full-year capex guidance was raised to $195–205 billion. Berkshire Hathaway CEO Greg Abel tripled the conglomerate's Alphabet stake to 6 percent of its U.S. equity portfolio, making it the conglomerate's second-largest holding after Apple. The company began developing a specialized AI inference chip codenamed "Frozen v2," embedding Gemini architecture in silicon for a planned 2028 deployment. In June 2026, a wave of senior AI researchers — including Nobel laureate John Jumper and Gemini co-lead Noam Shazeer — departed for Anthropic and OpenAI, and Alphabet shares fell 5 to 7 percent in a single day. Co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin both announced they were leaving California in response to the state's proposed billionaire wealth tax. A federal judge in Virginia ruled that Google illegally monopolized digital advertising markets by tying its publisher ad server and ad exchange to each other — the second US finding of illegal monopoly after the 2024 search ruling. The European Court of Justice issued a final ruling upholding Google's €4.1 billion Android antitrust fine, the European Commission adopted binding DMA specification decisions forcing Google to open Android to rival AI assistants and share search data with competing engines, fined Google €890 million under the DMA, and a Swedish court ordered Google to pay $1.5 billion in antitrust damages to PriceRunner. Google and Epic Games filed a revised settlement in March 2026 that resurrected the court's third-party app-store remedy but remained subject to judicial approval. Gemini 3.5 Pro missed a third internal deadline over coding performance and underwent a ground-up rebuild, remaining in limited enterprise preview, while pre-training of Gemini 4 began and three new models — Gemini 3.6 Flash, 3.5 Flash-Lite, and 3.5 Flash Cyber — were released in July.
In July 2026, a Los Angeles jury found Google liable alongside Meta in the first verdict holding social media companies responsible for addictive product design features rather than hosted content, awarding $6 million in damages. Google announced a major leadership restructuring, moving longtime search head Prabhakar Raghavan to Chief Technologist and integrating the Gemini app team into DeepMind. AI Mode became the default search experience across 200 countries, Google Photos launched Video Remix powered by Gemini Omni, and the Gemini Spark agent expanded to macOS. The May 2026 core update, released days after Google I/O, reinforced the shift toward AI-first search, with zero-click rates reaching 83 percent for AI Overview queries and 93 percent in AI Mode. YouTube captured nearly 95 percent of the 2.4 billion hours streamed during the 2026 FIFA World Cup, and the open medical model MedGemma surpassed 5 million downloads as AIIMS Delhi used it to build clinical models for leprosy and reproductive health. NotebookLM was rebranded as Gemini Notebook with new cloud-based code execution capabilities, having launched its mobile apps the previous year. Google Cloud made AlphaEvolve generally available as a code optimization agent, and DeepMind published the Co-Scientist multi-agent research system in Nature. DeepMind's Genie world-model family gained a public Project Genie prototype for AI Ultra subscribers, and the SimpleQA Verified factuality benchmark ranked Gemini 2.5 Pro first among frontier models. Chrome 149 patched a record 429 vulnerabilities after Google overhauled its bug bounty program to cope with AI-generated reports. Leaks pointed to the Pixel 11 series featuring the 2nm Tensor G6 chip and a Pixel Glow LED camera bar ahead of the August 12, 2026 Made by Google event. In a landmark enforcement action, a Google engineer was charged with insider trading for using confidential Year in Search data to profit on the Polymarket prediction market.