My guess is where it's been going for a while, in line with the signals sent by hiring their new CFO - juicing shareholder value by cost-cutting now that the easy gains have been had and "natural growth" is slowing.
2020: $41b operating income. 2021: $78b operating income (+$37b in one year).
2018: $31b operating income. 2019: $36b operating income.
So they just added an entire 2018 or 2019 size profit to their outcome in the past year.
That didn't come from squeezing pennies on little storage products and the like. That's from one of the world's largest snowballs continuing to roll down hill, piling up tens of billions in trivially easy profit addition as they go. When it comes to expanding margins, for an organization the size of Google that is still expanding relatively quickly in sales, it's far more important to hold down cost expansion as the profit soars (don't add those entirely unnecessary 20,000 heads) than it is to cut rounding error costs. Microsoft has similarly been masterful about doing that lately (unlike during the Ballmer era).
Their deal with Apple ensures their staying power. They own the other half of the Mobile ecosystem so even when lockdowns end and travel opens up there may be even more usage.
https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/2021Q4_alphabet_earnings...