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The company was VC-funded as a search engine but by the time they made significant investments in AI (DeepMind etc) they'd been a publicly held company earning multiple billions a year from advertising for a decade.

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Google is a VC. Their side projects are VC projects.

Google bought DeepMind and their other major AI acquisitions. Public companies make corporate venture investments for very different reasons than LP-backed VCs. They do early-stage investments to search for emerging players they can buy as soon as possible or to gain market intelligence on trends. They do later stage investments to help grow future vendors or customers and sometimes to foster ecosystems that form their competitive moat.

But if they think it's important to their core business, corporations don't want to invest, they want to buy. Source: I used to be involved in corporate venture investing at a top 10 valley tech leader.

If your definition of VC is "Literally anything that requires a long term investment of money" then sure, but I think most people mean something different than that.

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