Alphabet Inc. in the context of "Northern California"

Google LLC (/ˈɡuː.ɡəl/ , GOO-gəl) is an American multinational technology corporation focused on information technology, online advertising, search engine technology, email, cloud computing, software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial intelligence (AI). It has been referred to as "the most powerful company in the world" by the BBC, and is one of the world's most valuable brands. Google's parent company Alphabet Inc. has been described as a Big Tech company.

Google was founded on September 4, 1998, by American computer scientists Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Together, they own about 14% of its publicly listed shares and control 56% of its stockholder voting power through super-voting stock. The company went public via an initial public offering (IPO) in 2004. In 2015, Google was reorganized as a wholly owned subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. Google is Alphabet's largest subsidiary and is a holding company for Alphabet's internet properties and interests. Sundar Pichai was appointed CEO of Google on October 24, 2015, replacing Larry Page, who became the CEO of Alphabet. On December 3, 2019, Pichai also became the CEO of Alphabet.

S&P 500 (Standard and Poor's 500) is a stock market index tracking the stock performance of 500 leading companies listed on stock exchanges in the United States. It is one of the most commonly followed equity indices and includes approximately 80% of the total market capitalization of U.S. public companies, with an aggregate market cap of more than $57.401 trillion as of August 29, 2025.

The S&P 500 index is a public float weighted/capitalization-weighted index. The ten largest companies on the list of S&P 500 companies account for approximately 38% of the market capitalization of the index and the 50 largest components account for 60% of the index. As of September 2025, the 10 largest components are, in order of highest to lowest weighting: Nvidia (7.2%), Microsoft (6.3%), Apple (5.9%), Alphabet (5.0%, including both class A & C shares), Amazon (4.1%), Meta Platforms (3.2%), Broadcom (2.8%), Tesla (2.3%), Berkshire Hathaway (1.8%), and JPMorgan Chase (1.4%). The components that have increased their dividends in 25 consecutive years are known as the S&P 500 Dividend Aristocrats. Companies in the S&P 500 derive a collective 72% of revenues from the United States and 28% from other countries.

Waymo LLC (/ˈweɪmoʊ/ WAY-moh), formerly known as the Google Self-Driving Car Project, is an American autonomous driving technology company headquartered in Mountain View, California. It is a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc., Google's parent company. Waymo operates commercial robotaxi services available to the public in Phoenix (Arizona), San Francisco Bay Area (California), Los Angeles (California), Atlanta (Georgia), and Austin (Texas). Waymo services are available to select passengers on a waitlist in Silicon Valley (California). As of April 2025, it offers over 250,000 paid rides per week, totalling over 1 million miles monthly.

The company traces its origins to the Stanford Racing Team, which competed in the 2005 and 2007 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Grand Challenges. Google's development of self-driving technology began in January 2009, led by Sebastian Thrun, the former director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL), and Anthony Levandowski, founder of 510 Systems and Anthony's Robots. After almost two years of road testing, the project was revealed in October 2010. In fall 2015, Google provided "the world's first fully driverless ride on public roads". In December 2016, the project was renamed Waymo and spun out of Google as part of Alphabet. In October 2020, Waymo became the first company to offer service to the public without safety drivers in the vehicle.

The economy of the State of California is the largest in the United States, with a $4.048 trillion gross state product (GSP) as of 2024. It is the largest sub-national economy in the world. If California were an independent nation, it would rank as the fourth largest economy in the world in nominal terms, behind Germany and ahead of Japan.

California's Silicon Valley is home to some of the world's most valuable technology companies, including Apple, Alphabet, and Nvidia. As of June 2025, 58 of the Fortune 500 companies are headquartered in California.

Frances Hamilton Arnold (born July 25, 1956) is an American chemical engineer and Nobel Laureate. She is the Linus Pauling Professor of Chemical Engineering, Bioengineering and Biochemistry at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). In 2018, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for pioneering the use of directed evolution to engineer enzymes.

In 2019, Alphabet Inc. announced that Arnold had joined its board of directors. Since January 2021, she also served as an external co-chair of President Joe Biden's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST).

Mountain View is a city in Santa Clara County, California, United States, part of the San Francisco Bay Area. Named for its views of the Santa Cruz Mountains, the population was 82,376 at the 2020 census.

Mountain View was integral to the early history and growth of Silicon Valley, and is the location of many high technology companies. In 1956, William Shockley established Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Mountain View, the first company to develop silicon semiconductor devices in Silicon Valley. Mountain View houses the headquarters of many of the world's largest technology companies, including Google and Alphabet Inc., Intuit, NASA Ames Research Center, and former or existing headquarters for Symantec, 23andMe, LinkedIn, Samsung, Quora and Synopsys.

Big Tech, also referred to as the tech giants or tech titans, is a collective term for the largest and most influential technology companies in the world. It commonly denotes the five dominant firms in the U.S. technology industry—Microsoft, Apple, Alphabet (Google), Amazon, and Meta (Facebook)—which are also the largest companies in the world by market capitalization. Other companies sometimes included in the grouping include Nvidia, Tesla, Oracle, and Netflix.

The label draws a parallel to similar classifications in other industries, such as Big Oil, Big Soda, or Big Tobacco. The concept of Big Tech can also extend to the major Chinese technology firms—Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, and Xiaomi—collectively referred to as BATX.