Google and Alphabet
Google is an American search engine company founded in 1998 by Sergey Brin and Larry Page, now a subsidiary of [[Alphabet Inc.]] — a holding company formed in 2015 as a strategic restructuring of the business[^i1][^i2]. Google handles more than 70% of worldwide online search requests and its properties include Google Search and YouTube, the two most-visited websites worldwide[^i11][^i4]. 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].
In Q1 2026, Alphabet reported record revenue of $109.9 billion (up 22%) with net income surging 81% to $62.6 billion, driven by AI-powered growth across Search and Cloud[^i12]. [[Google Cloud]] revenue crossed $20 billion for the first time (up 63%), with over half of its $462 billion backlog expected to convert over 24 months. The company completed its largest acquisition ever — the $32 billion purchase of cloud security firm Wiz — and invested $35.7 billion in capital expenditure for the quarter, primarily in AI infrastructure. Google committed $10 billion to AI startup Anthropic at a $350 billion valuation, with up to $30 billion more tied to performance milestones, alongside providing 5 gigawatts of Google Cloud computing capacity[^i60].
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 arguing its market position came from "better technology, larger investments, and hard work"[^i28]. 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 prepared its largest-ever Digital Markets Act penalty against Google for search self-preferencing, with reports indicating a fine approaching €1 billion[^i31].
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 company also 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.
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 plans to add 2,000 more vehicles for a total fleet of 3,500 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 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].