This is measuring innovation by how big a spender you are. Maybe that isn't a good metric? It seems likely that whatever other companies you consider innovative also aren't spending hundreds of billions on their ideas.

So, the point is that they have a ton of cash. You hold cash because you want to invest in your own company. Implicitly, by not paying it out as dividends or buying back stock with that money, Alphabet is saying to the market "Trust us, we'll put that money to better use than you would. We'll make you a lot more money with this money"

To look at it from another perspective: if it's cheap for you to innovate, ok great! That means you can innovate a bunch more! Spend all that cash innovating away! Oh, you can't spend it all? That means you don't have a bottomless supply of ideas that you haven't been able to try out, it means you're already innovated out and should just buy back the stock to give the money back to investors

Yep, that's why they just announced a $25 billion buyback.