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X (incubator)

X (company)
Formerly called
Google X (2010–2015)
Subsidiary of Alphabet Inc.
Industry Research and development
Founded
  • January 2010; 7 years ago (2010-01) (as Google X, under Google)
  • October 2, 2015; 16 months ago (2015-10-02) (as X, under Alphabet Inc.)
Founders
Headquarters Mountain View, California, United States
Key people
Products
Parent Google (2010–2015)
Alphabet Inc. (2015–present)
Subsidiaries
Website x.company

X, an American semi-secret research-and-development facility founded by Google in January 2010 as Google X, operates as a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. X has its headquarters about a half mile from Google's corporate headquarters, the Googleplex, in Mountain View, California.

Work at X is overseen by entrepreneur scientist Astro Teller, as CEO and "Captain of Moonshots". The lab started with the development of Google's self-driving car.

On 2 October 2015, after the complete restructuring of Google into Alphabet, the company was renamed to X.

While X projects are often referred to as "moonshots" within the company, not all so-described moonshots are part of X. For example, Calico, Google's life extension project, is considered a moonshot but is not a part of X.

In mid-2014, Google said there were eight projects being developed at X. As of late 2014, X projects that have been revealed include Wing, Glass, Loon, and the driverless car.

Waymo was a project by Google that involves developing technology for driverless cars. In December 2016, Google transitioned the project into a new company called Waymo, housed under Google’s parent company Alphabet. The project was led by Google engineer Sebastian Thrun, director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and co-inventor of Google Street View. Thrun's team at Stanford created the robotic vehicle Stanley which won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge and its US$2 million prize from the United States Department of Defense. The team developing the system consisted of 15 engineers working for Google, including Chris Urmson, Mike Montemerlo, and Anthony Levandowski, who had worked on the DARPA Grand and Urban Challenges.


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