Google

Google is the artificial-intelligence and internet-services company behind some of the most widely used AI products in the world. Founded in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google is the main operating subsidiary of Alphabet Inc., which trades publicly as GOOG and GOOGL. Google builds AI across the entire stack — from custom silicon to frontier models to consumer apps used by billions of people.

At the model layer, Google's AI research is led by Google DeepMind, the London-based lab behind the Gemini family of models, AlphaFold, and AlphaGo. Gemini powers Google's assistant experiences, the Gemini app, and AI features across Search, Workspace, and Android.

At the infrastructure layer, Google designs its own Tensor Processing Units, or TPUs — custom AI accelerators that train and serve its largest models — and sells AI to businesses through Google Cloud and its Vertex AI platform. Those chips have become an external business at extraordinary scale: Anthropic has committed to a five-year, roughly $200 billion purchase of Google Cloud capacity built largely on TPUs, and in August 2026 the Financial Times described the financing behind it — a Morgan Stanley-arranged private-credit vehicle that buys the hardware with outside money and leases it to Anthropic, with Apollo and Blackstone anchoring the debt. Selling accelerators to a direct rival in frontier models, and inventing an aircraft-style leasing structure to finance it, marks a shift in what a TPU is for: no longer only an internal cost advantage, but a product Google can sell to the labs it is racing.

At the product layer, Google embeds AI into the tools people already use: AI Overviews and AI Mode in Search, generative features in Google Workspace, the Veo video model, the Gemini Notebook research assistant (renamed from NotebookLM in July 2026), and image tools like Nano Banana. Google also develops SynthID, an invisible watermark that tags AI-generated images, audio, video, and text so they can be identified later — embedded across Google's generative products since 2023 and increasingly adopted by other labs as a cross-industry content-authenticity signal. Its reach through Search, Chrome, Android, YouTube, and Workspace gives it a distribution advantage few competitors can match.

That distribution advantage is now the subject of direct regulatory action. On July 16, 2026, the European Commission issued two binding specification decisions under the Digital Markets Act that target precisely the channels above. The first requires Google to give rival AI assistants the system-level Android access it had reserved for Gemini — their own wake word, the ability to act inside apps on a user's behalf, and task delegation — applying from July 2027. The second requires Google to share the search data only it collects at scale with competing search engines and, notably, with AI chatbots that offer search functionality, applying from January 2027 through a multi-layered anonymisation scheme developed with privacy regulators. Google objected sharply: chief legal officer Kent Walker said the orders introduce "unprecedented risks to user privacy, device security" and national security. Non-compliance with the act carries fines of up to 10 percent of global turnover. The decisions matter beyond the immediate remedy — they establish that assistant placement on a mobile operating system, and the search-data moat underneath it, are contestable rather than proprietary.

That scale also carries a growing energy footprint. Google's 2025 environmental report disclosed a 37% jump in its electricity use — its largest single-year rise ever, and more than 250% above 2019 — driven mostly by AI. The company still trimmed operational emissions by 2% by matching its consumption with renewable-energy purchases, and it signed agreements for over 12 gigawatts of new clean power during the year. Even so, Google acknowledges the defining tension of the AI era in its own words: its infrastructure buildout "is currently accelerating faster than the grid is decarbonizing."

Together, Google's combination of frontier research, custom hardware, hyperscale cloud, and global distribution makes it one of the defining companies of the AI era.