ALPHABET BRANDS

Alphabet Overview

Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google—originally called “BackRub”—in 1998 with the aim of organising the world’s information. Since then, the company has evolved from a search engine into a global provider of digital infrastructure. In 2015, Google restructured under a new holding company, Alphabet, although this overview continues to refer to the business as Google for simplicity.

Google provides a suite of free, indispensable consumer tools such as Gmail for email and Google Maps and Waze for navigation. These services capture high-fidelity user data, which Google then uses to deliver targeted advertising based on users’ search intent. Advertising clients purchase these placements through the Google Ads (formerly AdWords) platform. This data-driven advertising engine underpins Google Services, the segment responsible for most of the company’s roughly $350 billion in FY2024 revenue. Google remains the world’s largest advertising company by revenue, generating approximately twice the advertising income of Meta, its nearest competitor.

Alongside its advertising business, Google continues to expand Google Cloud, competing directly with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.

The company also designs its own custom AI chips, known as Tensor Processing Units (TPUs). Unlike competitors that rely on generic hardware, Google has spent more than a decade developing TPUs to optimise its internal workloads and reduce data-centre operating costs. These chips enable Google to train and run its Gemini AI models at a lower cost per token than rivals dependent on rented GPUs. Google has begun commercialising this capability, with reports of strategic agreements to provide TPU capacity to companies such as Meta.