The company's fourth cable, named Grace Hopper, connects landing points in New York (US), Bude (UK) and Bilbao (Spain), and is expected to become operational in 2022. Google's Global Offices sum a total of 86 locations worldwide, with 32 offices in North America, three of them in Canada and 29 in the United States, California being the state with the most Google's offices with 9 in total including the Googleplex. In May 2015, Google announced its intention to create its own campus in Hyderabad, India. Recognized as one of the biggest ever commercial property acquisitions at the time of the deal's announcement in January, Google submitted plans for the new headquarter to the Camden Council in June 2017.
Consumer services
Page and Brin would also use their friend Susan Wojcicki's garage as their office when the search engine was set up in 1998. Google began in January 1996 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were both PhD students at Stanford University in California, United States. The company has received criticism involving issues such as privacy concerns, tax avoidance, censorship, search neutrality, antitrust, and abuse of its monopoly position.
On October 8, 2024, The U.S. government suggested it could request Google to divest parts of its business, such as the Chrome browser and Android, due to its alleged monopoly in online search. Later that month, both Facebook and Alphabet agreed to "cooperate and assist one another" in the face of investigation into their online advertising practices. The abuse of dominants position has been referred to as Google's constraint applied to Android device manufacturers and network operators to ensure that traffic on Android devices goes to the Google search engine. On June 27, 2017, the company received a record fine of €2.42 billion from the European Union (EU) for "promoting its own shopping comparison service at the top of search results". Google reportedly paid Apple $22 billion in 2022 to maintain its position as the default search engine on Safari. In 2019, a hub for critics of Google dedicated to abstaining from using Google products coalesced in the Reddit online community /r/degoogle.
Office locations
In February 2010, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission granted Google an authorization to buy and sell energy at market rates. The company announced the two locations will generate 169.5 megawatts of power, enough to supply 55,000 homes. In 2010, Google Energy made its first investment in a renewable energy project, putting $38.8 million into two wind farms in North Dakota. The new campus, reported to be the company's largest outside the United States, will accommodate 13,000 employees. In November 2013, Google announced plans for a new London headquarter, a 1 million square foot office able to accommodate 4,500 employees. Called Google Hudson Square, the new campus is projected to more than double the number of Google employees working in New York City.
Research and technology
In 2025, Google announced SynthID Detector, a tool that uses watermarking to identify whether content such as text, images, audio, or video was generated using Google products. The sister service, Google AdSense, allows website owners to display these advertisements on their website and earn money every time ads are clicked. This includes sales of apps, purchases made in-app, digital content products on Google and YouTube, Android and licensing and service fees, including fees received for Google Cloud offerings. Google expanded its search services to include shopping (launched originally as Froogle in 2002), finance (launched 2006), and flights (launched 2011). Department of Defense announced that Google had received a $200 million contract for AI in the military, along with Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI. Google reportedly said "the deal would help artificial-intelligence companies get better security and use more than one cloud service." In July 2025, the U.S.
- He had been trying to find a CEO that Page and Brin would accept for several months, but they rejected several candidates because they wanted to retain control over the company.
- Google donates to climate change denial political groups including the State Policy Network and the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
- This AI hub is projected to contribute up to $71 billion to Saudi Arabia’s economy by advancing AI-driven solutions tailored to the region’s specific needs and training local talent.
- In June 2000, it was announced that Google would become the default search engine provider for Yahoo!
- The company also decided to transform its office in Warsaw into a help center for refugees.
- In 2019, a hub for critics of Google dedicated to abstaining from using Google products coalesced in the Reddit online community /r/degoogle.
European Union
In November 2018, Google announced its plan to expand its New York City office to a capacity of 12,000 employees. On January 25, 2020, the formation of an international workers union of Google employees, Alpha Global, was announced. In a lawsuit filed January 8, 2018, multiple employees and job applicants alleged Google discriminated against a class defined by their "conservative political views, male gender, and/or … Caucasian or Asian race". In 2013, a class action against several Silicon Valley companies, including Google, was filed for alleged "no cold call" agreements which restrained the recruitment of high-tech employees.
Shares were sold in an online auction format using a system built by Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse, underwriters for the deal. The company opened on the NASDAQ National Market under the ticker symbol casina casino registration GOOGL with an offering of 19,605,052 shares at a price of $85 per share. At that time Page, Brin and Schmidt agreed to work together at Google for 20 years, until the year 2024. In 2003, after outgrowing two other locations, the company leased an office complex from Silicon Graphics, at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway in Mountain View, California. He had been trying to find a CEO that Page and Brin would accept for several months, but they rejected several candidates because they wanted to retain control over the company. Terry Semel, Yahoo's then-CEO, offered $3 billion to purchase the company, but Page and Brin reportedly held firm on a $5 billion valuation.
U.S. government contracts
Wiz, a company located in the U.S. and Israel, was cofounded in 2020 by Assaf Rappaport. In March 2025, Google agreed to acquire Wiz, a New York-based cybersecurity startup focusing on cloud computing, for US$32 billion. The initiative focuses on creating localized AI technologies, with an emphasis on integrating Arabic language capabilities and enabling widespread cloud adoption.
Products and services
- In an effort to maintain the company’s unique culture, Google designated a Chief Culture Officer whose purpose was to develop and maintain the culture and work on ways to keep true to the core values that the company was founded on.
- Google’s services contain easter eggs, such as the Swedish Chef’s “Bork bork bork”, Pig Latin, “Hacker” or leetspeak, Elmer Fudd, Pirate, and Klingon as language selections for its search engine.
- In August 2024, Google would lose a lawsuit which started in 2020 in lower court, as it was found that the company had an illegal monopoly over Internet search.
- The company is listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange under the ticker symbols GOOGL and GOOG, and on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol GGQ1.
- Google also hosts Google Books, which allows users to search books in its database and shows limited previews, or the full book when allowed.
- The same December, it was announced that a $1 billion, 1,700,000-square-foot (160,000 m2) headquarters for Google would be built in Manhattan’s Hudson Square neighborhood.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai accused Damore of violating company policy by "advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace", and he was fired on the same day. Google became Alphabet's largest subsidiary and the umbrella company for Alphabet's Internet interests. On August 10, 2015, Google announced plans to reorganize its various interests as a conglomerate named Alphabet Inc. Technology news website Recode reported that the company was purchased for $400 million, yet the source of the information was not disclosed.
The wind energy comes from two power plants in South Dakota, one in Iowa and one in Oklahoma. The commitment will make Google "the world's largest corporate buyer of renewable power, with commitments reaching 2.6 gigawatts (2,600 megawatts) of wind and solar energy". The corporation exercised this authorization in September 2013 when it announced it would purchase all the electricity produced by the not-yet-built 240-megawatt Happy Hereford wind farm. An average search uses only 0.3 watt-hours of electricity, so all global searches are only 12.5 million watts or 5% of the total electricity consumption by Google. Total carbon emissions for 2010 were just under 1.5 million metric tons, mostly due to fossil fuels that provide electricity for the data centers.
It had previously accepted requests for removing confidential data only, such as Social Security numbers, bank account and credit card numbers, personal signatures, and medical records. In 2022, Google began accepting requests for the removal of phone numbers, physical addresses and email addresses from its search results. This was revealed in documents concerning the antitrust lawsuit filed by ten US states against Google in December. Google spent "tens of millions of dollars" on getting major publishers such as Ubisoft and Take-Two to bring some of their biggest games to Stadia. In 2021, the Alphabet Workers Union was founded, composed mostly of Google employees.
In May 2011, the number of monthly unique visitors to Google surpassed one billion for the first time. These data centers allowed Google to handle the ever-changing workload more efficiently. To handle this workload, Google built 11 data centers around the world with several thousand servers in each. On March 11, 2008, Google acquired DoubleClick for $3.1 billion, transferring to Google valuable relationships that DoubleClick had with Web publishers and advertising agencies. The sale of $1.67 billion gave Google a market capitalization of more than $23 billion.
