Corporate parent of Google. Its Android operating system has nearly 4bn users worldwide. Faces two antitrust cases brought by the Department of Justice. On April 17th 2025 a district judge ruled that the company operates an illegal monopoly in digital advertising. In a separate case, a court ruled in 2024 that Google's search business was an illegal monopoly; the DoJ urged the court to force Google to sell its Chrome browser as part of the remedy.
On September 2nd 2025 Judge Amit Mehta rejected the government's demand that Google be broken up, in one of the biggest antitrust climbdowns since Microsoft was spared a breakup in 2001. He said the DoJ had "overreached" in calling for the divestment of Chrome and Android. Although he banned Google from signing exclusive deals for the distribution of some products including Chrome, Google Search and the Gemini app, he allowed payments to partners to continue, citing potentially "crippling" harm to companies that rely on them. The ruling requires Google to share user-interaction and other search-related data with smaller competitors. Mr Mehta wrote that AI had brought big changes to the search market, noting that hundreds of billions of dollars had flowed into startups creating generative-AI products that could disrupt established search businesses. Google is still expected to appeal against the original monopoly verdict. It also faces the risk that it may have to sell parts of its advertising business if its second antitrust trial goes against it.
Gail Slater, head of the DoJ's antitrust division under Donald Trump, described Google on April 21st 2025 as a threat to freedom of speech, freedom of thought and "free American digital markets". China's watchdogs are also probing Alphabet.
Sundar Pichai, Alphabet's boss, noted on an earnings call on April 25th 2025 that the removal of the de minimis exemption would create a "slight headwind" for its advertising business, as ad sales to Chinese e-commerce companies such as Shein and Temu could be jeopardised.
Alphabet is the only big tech company to go all in on vertical integration of the AI stack. Google pioneered the "transformer" architecture that underpins the current AI wave. It began designing its own chips more than a decade ago, after engineers estimated that if users ran a new voice-search feature on their phones for just a few minutes a day, the company would need to double its data-centre capacity. Google Cloud installs "tensor-processing units" (TPUs) designed in-house since 2015, now in their seventh generation, tailor-made to work with the rest of its hardware and software—including Gemini, its flagship AI model. Jefferies reckons Google will make about 3m TPUs next year, nearly half as many units as Nvidia. The result is that Google's cost per AI query is about twice that of traditional search, not five times as early estimates suggested. AI dilutes the gross margin for Google's search business only from 90% to 86%. Google Cloud sales are growing at an annual rate of 30% and account for nearly a tenth of Alphabet's operating profit, having been a drag as recently as late 2022. AI firms prize TPUs' higher energy efficiency compared with Nvidia's GPUs. In October 2025 Anthropic said it would buy an additional gigawatt of computing power from Google Cloud, worth perhaps $8bn-10bn a year, insisting on access to as many as 1m TPUs. In June 2025 Google announced it would rent data-centre capacity from CoreWeave, an AI cloud provider.
It was Google researchers who in 2017 published the seminal academic paper that led directly to ChatGPT. Demis Hassabis, the head of Google DeepMind, shared the 2024 Nobel prize in chemistry for his work on AI that predicts how proteins fold. Alphabet was sitting on a chatbot when OpenAI made a splash in late 2022, but released it only in February 2023.
AI Overviews, which began appearing above Google's signature blue links in May 2024, seem to be boosting search rather than cannibalising it, by keeping users engaged and searching for more. Google's search-advertising revenue has grown by about 10% year on year in recent quarters—for a business that already generates around $50bn in quarterly sales. In the four months to late October 2025, Alphabet gained $1trn in market value.
Alphabet generated a net profit of $132bn in 2025 on total revenue exceeding $400bn, the majority from advertising. Its market value stood at $3.7trn in early 2026, a relatively modest nine times revenue. About 30% of the combined sales of the five big American tech firms—Alphabet, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft and Apple—come from selling digital ads, and a similar share of profits. In the second quarter of 2025, at a time when the trade war had raised recession expectations, Google's ad revenues rose by 10% year on year.
On July 23rd 2025 Alphabet said it would raise capital spending for the year by $10bn to $85bn, mostly on data centres for AI. It signed a $3bn deal for hydropower from a dam in Pennsylvania and a $20bn deal with Intersect Power to build a data centre and solar farm with battery storage. In December 2025 Alphabet acquired Intersect Power outright for $5bn. Alphabet also has an agreement with Kairos Power, a startup developing small modular reactors, to provide nuclear power from 2030.
On November 18th 2025 Google released Gemini 3, a cutting-edge model that outperforms those of its biggest rivals, including OpenAI, on most benchmarks. Crucially, Gemini 3 was trained entirely on Google's own TPUs. Gemini has 650m monthly average users. The following day Alphabet's shares jumped to record highs; in the three months to late November 2025 they soared by half, making Alphabet the world's third-most valuable company. Bloomberg Intelligence expects Google's capital expenditures to hit $95bn next year, with nearly three-quarters used to train and run AI models.
On May 19th 2026 Google unveiled a new line-up of AI agents powered by its latest Gemini 3.5 Flash model, which Google says is four times faster than other frontier models. Some agents will appear in the Gemini app (used by 900m people every month), others embedded directly in Google Search (used by more than 3bn). An agent called Gemini Spark scans emails and organises group trips even after a user has closed their laptop; "information agents" in Google Search track sports, sales or the stockmarket. By May 2026 Alphabet's market value was within a hair's breadth of $5trn, having passed $4trn only in January. The number of tokens consumed by Google's services rose to 3.2 quadrillion a month, up from 480trn a year earlier. Google's capital expenditure in 2026 will be up to $190bn, six times as much as four years earlier.
In early 2026 Apple announced it would use Google's Gemini large language models to power an upgraded Siri voice assistant, alongside other new features—deepening a collaboration in which Google already pays Apple tens of billions of dollars a year. By embedding Gemini across both the Apple and Android ecosystems, Google has the potential to access vast data to make its models cleverer still. The market value of Alphabet recently shot past that of Apple. In October 2025 Google launched Android XR, a software platform designed to power VR headsets and smart glasses manufactured by Samsung and others.
In early 2024 Google unveiled an image-generation feature that depicted popes and Vikings as black-skinned—a botched but well-meaning attempt to avoid stereotypes. Google swiftly apologised, but the episode became a rallying point for critics who accused LLMs of embedding progressive ideology. Donald Trump cited it in his July 2025 executive order "Preventing Woke AI in the Federal Government". Google has since used so-called red teams to root out political biases in its models.
Google has introduced AI summaries alongside its search results, used by more than 1.5bn people each month by May 2025. In May 2025 Pichai announced a more conversational "AI mode" for the search engine, powered by Google's Gemini models. Google has also woven generative AI into its advertising business to help companies create content and manage campaigns.
In 2018 Google was forced to relinquish a Pentagon contract called Project Maven, which used machine learning to analyse footage from drones, after an internal revolt at the company. It scrapped restrictions on the use of AI for defence purposes in 2024 and is now taking on contracts for both classified and unclassified work with the Pentagon.
Ben Gomes is Google's chief technologist for learning. Google's Learn Your Way tool can adapt texts to users' reading ability and personalise examples to their interests. A pilot in India for Google's Read Along app found that participants were 60% likelier to improve their reading proficiency than a control group. Google predicts that "AI may ultimately allow every learner to take a truly individualised learning journey." Google also offers a "guided learning" setting that provides step-by-step guidance rather than direct answers, similar to OpenAI's "study mode" for ChatGPT.
Google DeepMind launched AlphaGenome on June 25th 2025, a deep-learning model that can predict how small genetic changes will affect cell function. Separately, AlphaProteo is a Google DeepMind system that designs proteins to bind to specified targets. Isomorphic Labs, a London-based Alphabet spin-out led by Sir Demis Hassabis, has contracts with Eli Lilly and Novartis to test candidate drug molecules' interactions with target proteins. AlphaFold, a protein-folding AI model whose creators won half the 2024 Nobel prize for chemistry, inspired much of the field of AI-driven protein design.
Google DeepMind researcher Yannis Assael developed Aeneas, an AI model for ancient Latin inscriptions, described in a Nature paper in July 2025. Trained on more than 175,000 inscriptions spanning the 7th century BC to the 8th century AD, Aeneas can date unseen texts to within 13 years, suggest geographical origins and predict missing text. Historians working together with Aeneas gave more accurate results than either alone. It is an iteration of an earlier model focused on Greek inscriptions.
Presidency: The greased pig in the field game of American politics.