The DeepMind purchase, and the price no filing carries
The UK register dates the change of ownership of DeepMind Technologies to 24 January 2014: shares were allotted that day, leaving capital of GBP 1,640.64, and a director was appointed under the same date. On 3 February six directors were removed at once — Hassabis, Suleyman, Legg and three investors — and on 10 February two new ones arrived. What Google paid is stated nowhere.
Why it matters
The price of DeepMind is one of the most repeated numbers in the history of AI, and no version of it comes from a document. Google's annual report for 2014 names Nest, Dropcam and Skybox separately and folds every other purchase of the year into a single line of $1,466 million with no breakdown, explaining that they are not shown separately because they are not material. What is documented about this deal is therefore the dates in the UK register — and a blank where the sum should be.
Form SH01, filed on 5 February 2014, records an allotment of shares on 24 January 2014 and capital of GBP 1,640.64 after it. A resolution filed on 31 January adopts new articles and records the appointment of a director under the date 24 January. Daniel Brunton was appointed on 29 January. On 3 February the appointments of Demis Hassabis, Mustafa Suleyman and Shane Legg as directors were terminated, Suleyman's as secretary too, along with the investor directors Jaan Tallinn, Luke Nosek and Bart Swanson. Kenneth Yi and Graham Law were appointed on 10 February and the registered office moved on 28 February. The register also shows Alphabet ceasing to be the person with significant control on 4 November 2019 in favour of Deepmind Holdings Limited. In Google's 2014 annual report the other-acquisitions line comes to $1,466 million, of which $405 million was attributed to intangible assets and $1,045 million to goodwill. That is the total of every unnamed purchase of the year, not the price of one of them. What this record does not assert. It names no price: not GBP 400 million, not $500 million, not $650 million. The word DeepMind occurs zero times in that annual report, and EDGAR full-text search returns it in no annual report filed during 2015 and in no Google or Alphabet filing of 2014 or 2015. The record does not restate the terms of the agreement on an ethics board and a bar on military use: the agreement itself has not been published, and DeepMind's annual accounts at the UK register are filed as scans with no text layer, from which a text extractor recovers 28 bytes. It does not assert that the removals of 3 February were a condition of the deal: the register records dates, not reasons.