Alphabet is Google's holding company, founded in 2015 and headquartered in Mountain View, California. Under its umbrella it bundles the core Google business (search, advertising, Android, YouTube, Cloud) and a range of other holdings, including the robotaxi company Waymo. The chief executive is Sundar Pichai, John L. Hennessy chairs the board, and founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin remain involved as employees and controlling shareholders.
Three segments
Alphabet reports in three segments. Google Services (search, advertising, Android, Chrome, YouTube, Play, devices) remains by far the largest segment; Google says advertising accounted for roughly 86% of revenue in the fourth quarter of 2025. Google Cloud grew 48% to US$17.7 billion in Q4 2025, reaching an annual run rate of more than US$70 billion; the cloud unit's backlog rose 55% quarter-over-quarter to US$240 billion. YouTube generated more than US$60 billion in advertising and subscription revenue for full-year 2025, according to Google, while more than 325 million users paid for services such as Google One and YouTube Premium by year-end. Other Bets bundles smaller holdings such as Waymo, which offers autonomous ride-hailing services.
AI relevance: Gemini, DeepMind and in-house chips
Through Google DeepMind, Alphabet operates one of the world's leading AI research units and integrates AI via the Gemini model family across its products. According to Google, Gemini 3 launched in December 2025 and was adopted faster than any previous model the company has released; the Gemini app had grown to over 750 million monthly active users by year-end, and the Gemini Enterprise platform sold more than eight million paid seats within four months. For training and inference, Alphabet develops its own AI accelerators: the seventh-generation Ironwood TPU scales, according to Google, to up to 9,216 chips per pod with 42.5 exaflops of compute and 192GB of memory per chip.
Business model
The advertising business around Google Search and YouTube funds extensive investment in data centers, AI research and cloud infrastructure. For 2026, Alphabet expects capital expenditures (CapEx) of US$175-185 billion, according to the company, driven mainly by AI infrastructure. With Gemini, its cloud division and its own AI hardware, Alphabet is thus both a user and a provider of AI technology.
Key figures
For fiscal year 2025, Alphabet's revenue exceeded US$400 billion for the first time, according to the company; Wikipedia puts the figure at roughly US$403 billion, with net income of about US$132 billion and about 194,668 employees (as of March 2026). On September 15, 2025, Alphabet became the fourth company to reach a US$3 trillion market valuation, following Nvidia, Microsoft and Apple, according to Wikipedia. The shares trade on Nasdaq under the tickers GOOGL (Class A) and GOOG (Class C); the Class A ISIN is US02079K3059.
A search business in transition
At the same time, the core web-search business is changing, as answer engines and AI-assisted search results shift the way users find information — a trend Alphabet is addressing with AI features built directly into Search and with the Gemini app.
This profile is a neutral description and is not investment advice.