Google

Google, founded in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, is the world's dominant search engine and a core division of Alphabet Inc., headquartered in Mountain View, California. It holds around 90 per cent of EU search market share. Google Cloud competes directly with Azure and AWS for enterprise AI workloads and, following the $32 billion acquisition of cloud security vendor Wiz in March 2026, is the largest pure-cybersecurity deal of the post-CrowdStrike era.

In April 2026, the European Commission issued preliminary DMA compliance measures requiring Google to share anonymised search rankings, user queries, click data, and view metrics with rival search engines and AI chatbots on FRAND terms; the consultation closed 1 May, with a binding decision due 27 July 2026 (six days before the EU AI Act AI Office gains GPAI enforcement powers). Google Cloud's joint venture with French defence group Thales, trading as S3NS, won a slot in the EU's EUR 180m institutional sovereign cloud framework at SEAL-2, not SEAL-3, because it runs on Google Cloud infrastructure subject to the US CLOUD Act.

A record DMA self-preferencing fine against Google, in the high triple-digit-million-euro range under Article 6(5), is complete but has not been issued. Internal proceedings concluded months ago; the hold has been attributed to a personal intervention by Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. In May 2026 more than 30 civil-society organisations led by Open Markets Institute Europe wrote to her expressing grave concern at the delay. If issued before the summer recess, the fine would precede the binding 27 July search-data ruling, creating a double-barrel enforcement sequence against Alphabet within five weeks. Teresa Ribera, the Commission competition chief, called US pressure on EU digital enforcement blackmail and said the rulebook was not up for negotiation.

Google's 2026 EU exposure is triple-stacked: the delayed DMA fine for self-preferencing; the binding search-data sharing order due 27 July; and EU AI Act GPAI enforcement activating 2 August. All three instruments land in a six-week window. The geopolitical calculus keeping the fine on the President's desk is the same dynamic that delayed CAIDA: Washington has explicitly warned that aggressive EU digital enforcement threatens the EU-US trade framework.

On 1 April 2026, the IRGC named Google among 18 US technology companies designated as military targets over alleged AI targeting support for strikes on Iran.

Google's threat intelligence Arm, the Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG), which incorporates Mandiant, is a primary source for nation-state attribution. In May 2026, GTIG and Mandiant jointly disclosed that North Korea-nexus actor UNC1069 phished an Axios npm package maintainer to introduce malicious dependency plain-crypto-js into two widely-distributed Axios versions with a combined 180+ million weekly downloads. The backdoor WAVESHAPER.V2 was live for under three hours. The Wiz acquisition, completed March 2026, positions Google Cloud as the dominant cloud security player in the EU enterprise market, a position contested by European cloud-native firms and complicated by its CLOUD Act exposure.

Google's 3 June water-stewardship pledge committed $17 million across seven US states and set a target of replenishing 19 billion gallons per year by 2030, more than double its 2024 consumption of 8.1 billion gallons. Infrastructure head Ben Townsend framed per-site reporting as a blueprint for communities evaluating campus proposals. The pledge papers over a disclosure gap most visible at The Dalles, Oregon, where Google's campus draws roughly 550 million gallons a year, about 40% of the city's total water supply, and residents face a projected 99% rise in water rates by 2036 under a $260 million system upgrade. Google's aggregate replenishment target nets returns across all sites and basins, while The Dalles absorbs a single-tap draw that no portfolio-level figure reverses.

Google Cloud's autonomous Strategy Agent, co-developed with Formula E under their multi-year Principal AI Partnership, was named a nominee in the Content Creation category of the IBC 2026 Innovation Awards. The system processes a sub-millisecond, multi-feed torrent of racing telemetry, video and audio data within the compressed race window to deliver tailored predictions and explanations live inside broadcasts. The nomination places Google alongside a wider vendor cluster of agentic-editing entrants at IBC, including Limecraft and WDR Sportschau's deliver.media.