Alphabet
US technology conglomerate and parent company of Google, Waymo and DeepMind
Alphabet added 2,865 staff in the second quarter of 2026, taking group headcount to 198,933 by 30 June, its fourth consecutive quarterly rise, even as it lifted 2026 capital-spending guidance to $205bn on 22 July.
Last refreshed: 4 August 2026 · Appears in 4 active topics
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Timeline for Alphabet
raised guidance the prior week, feeding the combined total
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Data Centres: Boom and Backlash: Alphabet lifts 2026 capex to $205bnBackground
Alphabet is the parent company of Google, formed in 2015 to separate Google's core advertising and search business from ventures such as Waymo, DeepMind and Verily. Headquartered in Mountain View, California and led by chief executive Sundar Pichai, it employs around 199,000 people and reports revenue exceeding $350 billion a year.
Alphabet has become one of the world's largest AI infrastructure investors alongside Microsoft and Amazon, with quarterly capital spending on data centres and Google Cloud repeatedly setting records; Pichai has told investors the company is compute constrained, an admission that AI demand is outpacing Alphabet's own infrastructure build .
Its subsidiary Isomorphic Labs, majority-owned by Alphabet, drew the UK's Sovereign AI Unit into a funding round as the unit's first equity stake in a majority-foreign-owned company, a precedent with no published ownership threshold attached . Google also carries accumulating EU regulatory exposure, from Android antitrust to Digital Markets Act enforcement, that lands on Alphabet's consolidated results even though the underlying compliance changes sit with Google's own product teams.
Group headcount keeps climbing with capex
Alphabet's group headcount reached 198,933 on 30 June 2026, its fourth consecutive quarterly increase, up 2,865 in three months and 11,830 across the year . That growth sits inside a FAR larger capital commitment: having guided 2026 capex at $180-190bn only three months earlier, Alphabet lifted the range to $195-205bn at its 22 July results, with contracted-but-unrecognised cloud revenue, its backlog, already standing at $460bn the quarter before .
For the parent company the two figures move together rather than separately: rising headcount funds the engineering behind an infrastructure build that keeps outrunning its own guidance, and neither number can be read in isolation from the other when judging whether the group's AI bet is paying for itself.
Its Google unit was fined 890m euros
Brussels fined Google 890 million euros on 23 July 2026 for Digital Markets Act breaches: 460 million euros for favouring its own shopping and travel results in Search and 430 million euros for restricting cheaper Play Store deals, with 60 days to comply . The fine had sat unsigned on Commission President Ursula von der Leyen's desk since March, held back amid a parallel EU-US tariff fight over digital services taxes .
It landed four days before the Commission's own Deadline and a week after the Court of Justice separately confirmed Alphabet's 4.1bn euro Android antitrust fine on 2 July, closing an eight-year case just as the newer DMA fine arrived . Trump ordered a tariff probe into EU tech rules the next day.