Alphabet, Inc.

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Parent company and golden child.

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Alphabet Inc. is an American technology conglomerate and holding company formed in 2015 as a strategic restructuring of Google and its various subsidiaries. Commonly referred to as Google’s parent company, Alphabet was created to implement Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s strategic goal of continuous technological innovation across multiple industries and sectors, including health care, entertainment, transportation, venture capital financing, and artificial intelligence (AI).

The semiautonomous structure aims to allow company segments to pursue new opportunities with the support of shared resources and cooperation.

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Welcome to the Googleplex.

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Google Services is by far Alphabet’s largest business segment. In 2025, it generated $342.7 billion, or 85.1%, of Alphabet’s $402.8 billion in annual revenue, compared with $58.7 billion from Google Cloud and $1.5 billion from Other Bets.

In addition to organizing its various initiatives, Alphabet’s segmentation provides a number of key advantages:

Overall, the creation of Alphabet was a strategic move to allow Google and its various other ventures to operate in their respective domains effectively and simultaneously with greater transparency, maximum efficiency, and minimal risk exposure.

On August 10, 2015, Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin announced they were creating the new holding company, Alphabet Inc. A move partly inspired by Warren Buffett’s investment holding company Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A), the creation of a holding company would restructure Google and its various other businesses as subsidiaries of Alphabet Inc., now the parent company. This allowed the various departments that weren’t directly related to Google’s main Internet services to spin off into their own subcompanies within the same business umbrella.

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Sundar Pichai, 2023.

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Sundar Pichai, who was originally Google’s product chief, was named Google’s new CEO, while Brin and Page managed Alphabet as its president and CEO, respectively. Alphabet’s founding was finalized on October 2, 2015.

In 2019, when Page and Brin stepped down from their positions at Alphabet, Pichai—already Google’s CEO—assumed the position of CEO for Alphabet. As a strong proponent of a mobile-first approach, Pichai played a pivotal role in the success of the Android operating system and the proliferation of its large-scale ecosystem.

Pichai also strongly advocated for Alphabet’s artificial intelligence initiatives, enabling the company to pursue developments in voice recognition, image processing, self-driving vehicles (Waymo), and Google’s Gemini AI models.

Under Pichai, Google launched or overhauled numerous products and services, including:

Since 2015, Alphabet has acquired more than 160 companies, but as of 2024, Google’s legacy services—including Google Search, YouTube, and Android—remain the company’s primary revenue drivers. With Google’s legacy products serving as Alphabet’s primary anchor, the company’s various subsidiaries have some financial breathing room to experiment, produce, and aim to flourish in their respective domains at a pace appropriate to each technological venture.

The risk in this strategy, however, is it assumes the reliability of its legacy profit centers—and search in particular—can continue uninterrupted. In August 2024, for example, a U.S. district judge ruled that Google’s search engine violated the nation’s antitrust laws by operating as a monopoly and employing anticompetitive practices to protect its monopoly status. The ruling marked a significant step in the U.S. government’s efforts to challenge Google’s dominance in online search.

After hearings on possible remedies, the court entered a final judgment in December 2025 requiring Google to end certain exclusive agreements and share some search data with rivals, though it stopped short of requiring the company to divest Chrome, Android, or its core search business.

In July 2026, the European Commission separately fined Google €890 million ($1 billion) under the Digital Markets Act, concluding that the company had unfairly favored its own services in search results and imposed anticompetitive restrictions through Google Play. Together, the U.S. and European actions underscored the growing regulatory challenges facing Alphabet as competition in AI-powered search intensified.

In September 2026, Google disclosed that a Gemini AI model had gained unauthorized access to the computer systems of three companies during a cybersecurity test conducted in May. The model was participating in a simulated hacking exercise, but a bug unintentionally provided it access to the Internet. It gained access to one company’s system by guessing a password and to two others after finding credentials in public online repositories.

In each case, Google said, Gemini stopped the intrusion after recognizing that it had accessed a real company rather than part of the simulation. Google said the model’s safety measures worked as intended, but didn’t identify which version of Gemini was involved.