What Google bought
Google has bought more than 200 companies. The biggest cheque it ever wrote cleared five months ago, for a name most people have never heard.
Six of them, in the order the money left.
YouTube, 2006, $1.65bn. A 20-month-old site with no revenue and a copyright problem, bought with stock. It is the deal everyone cites, and it is the smallest one on this chart.
DoubleClick, announced 2007 and closed 2008 after a regulator review, $3.1bn. Not a consumer product at all - the plumbing that decides which ad you see and what the publisher gets paid. Most of what Google is accused of today runs on what it bought here.
Motorola Mobility, 2012, $12.5bn. Google's biggest deal for the next fourteen years. It sold the handset business to Lenovo two years later for $2.91bn, keeping most of the patents. Whether that counts as a loss depends entirely on what you think the patents were worth.
Nest, 2014, $3.2bn. A thermostat company, and Google's entrance to the house.
Mandiant, 2022, $5.4bn. The firm companies call after they have been breached.
Wiz, 2026, $32bn. Announced in March 2025, cleared by the US Justice Department that October, approved in Europe in February, and completed on 11 March 2026. It is the largest acquisition in Google's 28-year history by a factor of two and a half, and it is a cloud security company almost nobody outside IT can name.
The shape worth noticing: the famous purchases were cheap and the expensive ones are invisible. YouTube cost 5% of what Wiz did.
Two caveats. These are announced deal values, not what was ultimately paid or written off - Motorola is the obvious case. And these six are a selection from more than 200 acquisitions; the $58bn is their sum, not Google's total spend on buying companies.
Next week: what happens to a company after Google buys it.
