Inside X, Google's top-secret moonshot factory (2024)

Gandalf arrives on rollerblades. It’s morning in the cafeteria at X – formerly Google X – and Astro Teller, X’s Captain of Moonshots, glides over dressed in coarse grey robes and a pointed hat, carrying oatmeal. Jedi stroll past to their desks, gripping coffee. Star Fleet officers queue for breakfast. This, it should be said, is unusual – it’s Halloween. But X is a surreal place. Outside, self-driving cars loop around the block. Sections of stratospheric balloons, designed to broadcast internet to remote places, hang in the lobby. Robots wheel around, sorting the recycling. Teller likens X to Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory; it seems only fitting that there be costumes.

Even standing inside X – a cavernous former mall in Mountain View, California – it’s hard to articulate exactly what X is. Within Alphabet, Google’s parent company, it is grouped alongside Deepmind in "Other Bets", although in that metaphor, X is more like the gambler. Its stated aim is to pursue what it calls “moonshots” – to try to solve humanity’s great problems by inventing radical new technologies. To that end, besides the self-driving cars (now a standalone company, Waymo) and internet balloons (Loon), X has built delivery drones (Wing), contact lenses that measure glucose in the tears of diabetics (Verily) and technology to store electricity using molten salt (Malta). It has pursued, but ultimately abandoned, attempts to create carbon neutral fuel from seawater, and replace ocean freight with cargo blimps. It once earnestly debated laying a giant copper ring around the North Pole to generate electricity from the Earth’s magnetic field.

That might sound fantastical or even absurd, but every day you almost certainly use something developed at X. Google Brain, the deep-learning division that now informs everything from Google Search to Translate, began at X. So did camera software GCam, used in Google Pixel phones; indoor mapping in Google Maps; and Wear OS, Android’s operating system for wearable devices.

But those are beside the point. “Google Brain, the cars, Verily, everything else – those are symptoms. Side effects of trying weird things, things that are unlikely to work,” Teller says. “We are a creativity organisation, not a technology organisation.” The rollerblades, which he wears every day, are tucked neatly under the table. (They save him eight minutes a day between meetings.) X, he explains, is not so much a company as a radical way of thinking, a method of pursuing technological breakthroughs by taking crazy ideas seriously. X’s job is not to invent new Google products, but to produce the inventions that might form the next Google.

X was once seen as a punchline in Silicon Valley (and on Silicon Valley). Today, its self-driving cars have logged 10 million miles on public roads, and operate an autonomous ride-sharing service in Arizona. Loon’s balloons provide internet access to communities in rural Peru and Kenya. Wing, X’s drone delivery effort, is carrying food and medicines to customers in Australia. Still, as Alphabet continues to be buffeted by employee protests and leadership changes – in December 2019, founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin stepped down, handing the company to Google CEO Sundar Pichai – X is facing renewed scrutiny to prove that its moonshots are more than just an indulgence, or expensive PR stunts. X celebrates its tenth anniversary in 2020. When will its bets pay off?

Alphabet is not the first company to set up a laboratory for chasing moonshot ideas. In 1925, AT&T and Western Electric founded Bell Labs, which assembled scientists and engineers from different disciplines to advance the field of telecommunications. Bell Labs invented the transistor, the first lasers and photovoltaic cells, winning nine Nobel prizes in the process. Ever since, corporate research labs, from Xerox PARC to Lockheed Martin's Skunk Works and DuPont’s Experimental Station, have played a central role in producing breakthrough inventions. Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon all have corporate research labs. Google has several, including Google AI (formerly Google Research), Robotics at Google, and Advanced Technologies and Projects, which works on things like AR and smart fabrics.