Only money spent that turns into an asset is investment. I’m not sure how it is in US, but in Germany, for example, not even registering a patent is an investment and does not imply the creation of an asset — only buying the patent creates the asset.
What they meant was that the R&D was fully deductible, not amortized over a number of years. It's like saying that a business's electricity bill is "tax-free" because they can deduct it from their revenues immediately.
And as it is, Google certainly paid property taxes immediately on the office building as well as FICA on all of the employees who, of course, paid their own taxes.
But haters of the R&D system love to call it "tax-free".
There's the benefit of expensing the costs over amortizating them - but there's also straight up cash in the form of R&D tax credits - it's one method tech companies use to minimize their tax bills:
