Google and Alphabet
[[Google]] — founded in 1998 by Sergey Brin and Larry Page — is the largest subsidiary of [[Alphabet Inc.]], handling more than 70% of worldwide online search requests through properties including Google Search and YouTube[^i1][^i2][^i11]. As of May 2026, the company had a market cap of $4.81 trillion and annual revenue of $422.50 billion[^i7][^i52].
Alphabet was created to allow founders Page and Brin to pursue innovation across health care, entertainment, transportation, venture capital, and artificial intelligence. Under Alphabet's structure, [[Google]] operates as the largest subsidiary alongside ventures such as [[Waymo]], Calico, Nest, CapitalG, and DeepMind. Advertising remains the primary revenue source: by 2023, Alphabet generated $175 billion from advertising tied to user search requests[^i8]. Alphabet's three reporting segments are Google Services, Google Cloud, and Other Bets, with Google Services contributing 92% of revenue as of 2022[^i10]. For FY2025, Alphabet reported consolidated revenue of $402.8 billion, up 15% year-over-year, with Google Services at $342.7 billion, Google Cloud at $58.7 billion, and Other Bets at $1.5 billion.[^i73]
In Q2 2026, Alphabet reported record revenue of $119.8 billion (up 24%) with Google Cloud surging 82% to $24.8 billion[^d1]. However, quarterly capital expenditure of $44.9 billion drove first-ever negative free cash flow, with full-year capex guidance raised to $195–205 billion[^d2]. The Gemini app had 950 million monthly active users, and nearly 90% of Fortune 100 companies used Gemini Enterprise. In April 2026, Google committed up to $40 billion to [[Anthropic]] at a $350 billion valuation — $10 billion in upfront cash with the remainder tied to performance milestones — alongside a Google Cloud agreement to deliver 5 gigawatts of computing capacity over five years[^i74][^i75].
On the regulatory front, the European Commission fined Google €890 million ($1 billion) in July 2026 under the Digital Markets Act for search self-preferencing and Play Store restrictions — the largest DMA penalty against any company[^d3]. President Donald Trump threatened tariffs and a Section 301 trade investigation in response[^d4]. Days earlier, the EU issued binding DMA decisions requiring Google to open 11 Android features to rival AI assistants and share search data with competitors starting January 2027[^d5].
Regulatory environment
Both companies have faced significant antitrust actions. In August 2024, a U.S. district court found Google had an illegal monopoly over internet search[^i5], ultimately imposing behavioral remedies including a "Choice Screen" requirement for competing search engines rather than a structural breakup[^i14]. Google filed an appeal at the D.C. Circuit in May 2026, arguing its market position came from "better technology, larger investments, and hard work" and challenging the data-sharing remedies imposed by the court.[^i28][^i72]
On July 2, 2026, the European Court of Justice dismissed Google's final appeal and upheld a €4.1 billion ($4.7 billion) fine for abusing Android's dominant position, marking the final conclusion of an eight-year legal battle and the largest antitrust penalty in EU history.[^i65] The European Commission separately issued binding measures under the Digital Markets Act ordering Google to open Android to rival AI assistants and to share search data with third-party search engines, with Android changes required by July 2027 and search data sharing to begin January 2027.[^i66]
In June 2026, the UK Competition and Markets Authority designated Google with strategic market status and ordered the company to let UK publishers opt out of AI Overviews while remaining in traditional search results — a first-of-its-kind regulatory requirement for AI-generated search content[^i61][^i37]. In parallel, the European Commission fined Google €890 million under the Digital Markets Act for search self-preferencing and Play Store restrictions, the largest DMA penalty to date[^d3].
AI and product developments
At Google I/O 2026, the Gemini app reached 900 million monthly active users, with Gemini nearly quadrupling its market share to approximately 27%[^i27][^i23]. Google launched Gemini 3.5 Flash, Gemini Spark — a 24/7 personal AI agent — and Gemini Omni for unified multimodal generation. The higher-end Gemini 3.5 Pro, originally promised for June, was delayed until July 2026 with Google citing the need for additional work on coding capabilities.[^i68] Google also rebranded NotebookLM as Gemini Notebook, adding native code execution capabilities for data analysis within notebooks, serving 30 million users and 600,000 organizations.[^i69][^d7] In July 2026, Google released three additional AI models — Gemini 3.6 Flash, 3.5 Flash-Lite, and 3.5 Flash Cyber — with the cybersecurity variant restricted to government and trusted partners, and confirmed it had begun pre-training Gemini 4[^d6].
The company unveiled the biggest redesign of Google Search in over 25 years with multimodal input and information agents[^i26], announced the eighth-generation TPU architecture split between TPU 8t (training) and TPU 8i (inference)[^i64], and expanded [[Antigravity]] into a five-surface agent development platform.
At Google Marketing Live 2026, Google began testing advertisements within AI Mode and launched new monetization tools including Business Agent for Leads — a Gemini-built brand agent embedded directly in ads — and YouTube BrandStack for automated campaign management in India.[^i70] SynthID expanded from the Gemini app to Google Search and Chrome, with over 100 billion AI-generated images, videos, and audio files watermarked to date, and OpenAI, Nvidia, Kakao, and ElevenLabs agreeing to adopt the standard.[^i71]
YouTube continued as the number one streamer in the US for nearly three years[^i63], with full-year 2025 revenue surpassing $60 billion. Over one million channels used YouTube's AI creation tools daily in December 2025, and more than 20 million viewers used the Gemini-powered Ask tool. [[Waymo]] surpassed 500,000 paid rides per week, raised $16 billion at a $126 billion valuation, and launched the Ojai robotaxi — its first purpose-built autonomous vehicle[^i32][^i35]. The company has already expanded to more than 3,000 vehicles, with additional I-Pace and Ojai deployments bringing the fleet toward the original 3,500-unit target, and targets 1 million rides per week by end of 2026[^i62].
Google DeepMind's [[Willow]] quantum processor achieved the first-ever verifiable quantum advantage in October 2025[^i36], and was made available to external researchers through the Willow Early Access Program. Google announced a $15 billion AI-ready data centre in Vishakhapatnam, India, hosting up to 5 GW capacity and representing the company's largest single investment outside the US, to be built over five years (2026–2030).[^i67] The company expanded infrastructure commitments with a $920 million per month deal with SpaceX for Nvidia GPU access[^i59], placed an order with Intel for more than 3 million TPUs for 2028 production[^i42], and Alphabet raised $84.75 billion in equity to fund AI infrastructure[^i45].