Alphabet is spending billions to become a force in health care

America’s five tech behemoths have spent billions on various health-care bets. It is Alphabet, Google’s corporate parent, whose health-care ambitions are the most vaulting. Between 2019 and 2021 Alphabet’s venture-capital arms, Google Ventures and Gradient Ventures, and its private-equity unit, CapitalG, made about 100 deals, a quarter of Alphabet’s combined total, in life sciences and health care.