For the first time, Alphabet broke US$200 billion in revenue, which is almost triple the company's revenue from 2016

According to The Verge, Google parent company Alphabet hit a new record for annual revenue in 2021, showing no ill effects from the lingering coronavirus pandemic or ongoing issues with the global supply chain. For full-year 2021, the company saw a 41% year-over-year jump in revenue to US$257 billion. The company reported a revenue of US$75.3 billion in the fourth quarter of 2021, up 32% from the year earlier. 

Alphabet is mostly a collection of companies. The largest of which, of course, is Google. This newer Google is a bit slimmed down, with the companies that are pretty far afield of our main internet products contained in Alphabet instead. Alphabet is using its dominance in the search and advertising spaces and its massive size to find its next billion-dollar business. 

With growing threats from its big-tech peers Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon, Alphabet's drive to disrupt has become more urgent than ever before. The conglomerate is leveraging the power of its first moats of search and advertising and its massive scale to find its next billion-dollar businesses.

Alphabet is edging its way into industries adjacent to the ones where it has already found success and entering new spaces entirely to find opportunities for disruption. Its advantage over other AI startups and corporations working on disrupting healthcare is not just rooted in technology. It is also rooted in scale and resources. Google continued its expansion into AI-driven healthcare in 2020. In August, the company partnered with telehealth provider Amwell to automate patient checkout and waiting room processes across Amwell's client network, which spans 2,000 hospitals and 3,600 employers. Google's AI technologies have also been deployed to automate language translation services for patients and routine administrative tasks for physicians.