Alphabet Inc.

On August 11, 2015, Google announced plans to create a new public holding company, Alphabet Inc. Google co-founder and CEO Larry Page made this announcement in a blog post on Google's official blog. Alphabet was created to restructure Google by moving subsidiaries from Google to Alphabet, thus narrowing Google's scope. The new holding company would consist of Google as well as other businesses including X Development, Calico, Nest, Verily, Fiber, CapitalG, and GV. Sundar Pichai, the company's Product Chief, became the new chief executive officer of Google, replacing Page, who transitioned to the role of running Alphabet, along with co-founder Sergey Brin. Alphabet is the world's second-largest technology company by revenue, after Nvidia, the largest technology company by profit, and the world's most valuable companies.

In his announcement, Page stated that the planned holding company would allow for "more management scale, as we can run things independently that aren't very related" to Google. He clarified that, as a result of the new holding company, Google would be "a bit slimmed down, with the companies that are pretty far afield of our main internet products contained in Alphabet instead". He further stated that the motivation behind the reorganization is to make Google "cleaner and more accountable and better" and that he wanted to improve "the transparency and oversight of what we're doing".

Former executive Eric Schmidt revealed in the conference in 2017 the inspiration for this structure came from Warren Buffett and his management structure of Berkshire Hathaway a decade ago. Schmidt said he encouraged Page and Brin to meet with Buffett in Omaha to see how Berkshire Hathaway was a holding company made of subsidiaries with strong CEOs who were trusted to run their businesses.

Before it became a subsidiary of Alphabet, Google Inc. was first structured as the owner of Alphabet. The roles were reversed after a placeholder subsidiary was created for the ownership of Alphabet, at which point the newly formed subsidiary was merged with Google. Google's stock was then converted to Alphabet's stock. Under the Delaware General Corporation Law (where Alphabet is incorporated), a holding company reorganization such as this can be done without a vote of shareholders, as this reorganization was. The restructuring process was completed on October 2, 2015. Alphabet retains Google Inc.'s stock price history and continues to trade under Google Inc.'s former ticker symbols "GOOG" and "GOOGL".

On December 3, 2019, Page and Brin jointly announced that they would step down from their respective roles, remaining as employees and still the majority vote on the board of directors. Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google, assumed the CEO role at Alphabet while retaining the same at Google. The firm completed a stock split in mid-2022. On January 20, 2023, Pichai wrote a letter to all employees announcing that the company would be laying off about 12,000 jobs, or 6% of its global workforce. In the letter, Pichai wrote, "Over the past two years we've seen periods of dramatic growth. To match and fuel that growth, we hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today."

In January 2024, Waymo, the autonomous driving division of Alphabet Inc., which operates extensively in San Francisco, filed an application with the California Public Utilities Commission to expand service in Los Angeles. Such a license would allow the company to make full use of its fleet in the city instead of test drives by invitation. In August 2024, following the lawsuit filed by the United States Department of Justice in 2020, a United States district court found Alphabet guilty of violating anti-trust law. This marked the first anti-trust ruling against a U.S. company in 24 years. Alphabet has appealed the ruling.

On 10 December 2024, Alphabet's shares rose about 5% after the company unveiled its new quantum computing chip, Willow. The chip solved a complex problem in five minutes, a task that would take a classical computer longer than the age of the universe. Willow reduces error rates in quantum computing and can correct them in real time. Alphabet's stock was up 25% for the year, marking its best day since April 2024. On 15 September 2025, Alphabet became the fourth company—trailing Nvidia, Microsoft, and Apple—to top $3 trillion in market cap. At the time, shares were up more than 32% for the year amid optimism for AI adoption and a more-favorable-than-expected antitrust ruling that did not require the company to divest its Chrome browser platform.

According to an analysis by Bridgewater Associates, Alphabet, along with Amazon, Meta and Microsoft are expected to collectively invest about $650 billion to scale up AI-related infrastructure in 2026.

Investments

In November 2017, Alphabet Inc. led a Series A round of $71 million along with Andreessen Horowitz and 20th Century Studios in music startup UnitedMasters, founded by Steve Stoute. In addition to funding startups, Alphabet also invests in more mature companies, including publicly traded companies like Uber and privately held companies like Medium.

Acquisitions

An analysis of the company's investments in 2017 suggested that it was the most active investor in that period, outdoing the capital arm of Intel and also its own best customer. Alphabet, Inc. acquired seven of its own capital-backed startups in the 2017 financial year, with Cisco second having acquired six of the company's previous investments.

Lawsuits and controversies

In 2017, Alphabet Inc. sued Uber over technology similar to Alphabet's proprietary self-driving car technology. Alphabet's autonomous vehicle technology had been under development for a decade by Alphabet's Waymo (self-driving vehicle division). The proprietary technology is related to 14,000 documents believed to have been downloaded and stolen by a former Waymo engineer, subsequently employed by Uber. The lawsuit was settled in February 2018, with Uber agreeing not to use the self-driving technology in dispute and also agreed to provide Waymo with an equity stake of 0.34%, equating to around $245 million at the firm's early 2018 value.

In October 2018, a class action lawsuit was filed against Google and Alphabet due to "non-public" Google+ account data being exposed as a result of a privacy bug that allowed app developers to gain access to the private information of users. The litigation was settled in July 2020 for $7.5 million with a payout to claimants of at least $5 each, with a maximum of $12 each. In October 2020, the United States Department of Justice filed an antitrust lawsuit against Alphabet, alleging anti-competitive practices. On 2 December 2020, the National Labor Relations Board filed a complaint that claimed Alphabet Inc conducted unlawful monitoring and questioning of several workers at Google. The employees in question were fired for unionization attempts and protesting company policies. The board also alleges that Google unlawfully placed employees on administrative leave in retribution. Alphabet Inc has denied any wrongdoing and said it acted legally.

On June 7, 2021, Alphabet Inc. announced it had settled an antitrust suit with the French Autorité de la concurrence with a payment of $270 million. The settlement amounted to less than 0.7% of Alphabet Inc.'s yearly earnings. On June 12, 2021, it was announced that Japan would launch an antitrust probe into Alphabet Inc. and Apple Inc. to determine whether their dealings with Japanese smartphone makers violate current antitrust measures or could necessitate new ones. In May 2022, Russian authorities seized Google's Russian bank account, forcing it to file for bankruptcy one month later due to the inability to pay vendors and staff. However, free services such as Google Search, YouTube, Gmail, Maps, Android and Play were to remain available. In 2023, the company was criticized for conducting mass lay-offs without informing employees before they arrived to work, including many long-tenured and recently promoted employees. Around 12,000 jobs were cut, which reduced the company's workforce by 6%. According to various posts on social media, several Google employees discovered they had been terminated after they were unable to access their accounts and confirming it through news articles discussing the mass layoffs.

In June 2025, a United Nations report on corporations complicit in the Gaza genocide showed that Alphabet Inc. was one of several companies "central to Israel's surveillance apparatus and the ongoing Gaza destruction."

On September 23, 2025, Alphabet announced that it would reinstate YouTube creators that were banned for spreading misinformation about COVID-19 and the 2020 U.S. presidential election. Within the context of the suspension of Jimmy Kimmel and debates about free speech in the United States, Vice President JD Vance defended Kimmel's suspension and instead cited a letter sent by Alphabet legal counsel Daniel F. Donovan to U.S. House Judiciary Committee chairman Jim Jordan, claiming the Biden administration pressured YouTube to remove "non-violative user-generated content" containing misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 election, and announced that it would reinstate content creators previously banned due to the cited content; however, such claims have not formally been proven, and the U.S. Supreme Court dismissed in 2024 the First Amendment case Murthy v. Missouri (which claimed the Biden administration had pressured social media companies to censor conservative views, government criticism, and COVID-19 misinformation), ruling 6–3 that neither the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana nor other respondents had standing to bring the case. The decision of Alphabet to bring back YouTube creators who engaged in misinformation was criticized for prioritizing "free expression" over accurate information.

In August 2026, Alphabet agreed to pay £260m to settle a class action lawsuit that alleged they had imposed “unfair and excessive” charges on app developers selling apps on the Google Play Store.