The headquarters of Alphabet’s X labs in Mountain View, California, is easy to miss. A simple yellow “X” marks the visitors’ entrance to the sprawling building that was once a large indoor shopping mall. But on a weekday in late May, the parking lot is bustling, filled with employees and visitors, as X’s pod-like driverless cars buzz about. Inside, various teams of mostly young people—the company won’t say just how many people are employed at the facility—work on “moon shots,” which Alphabet defines as transformative technologies that could have a huge impact on the world. Besides the driverless cars, publicly identified projects at X include Loon, an effort to use high-altitude balloons to deliver the Internet to remote regions of the world; Wing, which is building self-navigating drones for delivering stuff; and Makani, which is developing odd flying wind turbines tethered to a ground station.
