Alphabet Reportedly Looking At Bond Sale To Fund AI

Alphabet, Google's parent, is looking for ways to raise about $15 billion from a U.S. high-grade dollar bond sale that will fund artificial intelligence investments.

Companies are spending billions of dollars to build out their AI infrastructure to support advertising initiatives and enterprise strategies. Amazon recently announced it would spend more than $200 billion this year on data centers, chips and other equipment related to AI.

Massive cloud-computing companies are expected to spend more than $650 billion this year to expand AI infrastructure, according to Bloomberg, reporting that since last year the market has been flooded with debt that investors have so far absorbed.

Regulatory filing suggests Alphabet is selling bonds in as many as seven parts, which means the company is offering seven different versions of debt, each with its own maturity date and interest rate. Each part has its own maturity date when the money must be paid back.

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The bond sale could impact Google's advertising business in several ways. The bond proceeds could fund the massive server and Tensor Processing Unit (TPC) capacity required to integrate ads into AI Overviews, Gemini, and its other AI platforms. Executives at the company also maintain that funding AI features expand search activity rather than cannibalize it, creating more ad inventory for advertisers.

Google's stock jumped on Monday on the news its parent company Alphabet would tap the U.S. bond market for the first time this year. The move follows its earnings report that it plans to spend up to $185 billion on capital expenditures in 2026, nearly double what it spent just a year ago. 

Amazon, Alphabet's Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle issued $121 billion in U.S. corporate bonds last ‍year, compared with an average $28 billion per year between 2020 and 2024, according to Reuters, citing a report from BofA Securities released today.

AI capital spending for cloud infrastructure and data centers is expected to reach $3 trillion in aggregate by 2029, according to a Bloomberg Intelligence estimates. 

Alphabet will sell debt in dollars, British pounds and Swiss francs with varying maturities, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing investor familiar with the matter. That will include debt with maturities of three to 100 years for the sterling debt, and of three to 25 years for the Swiss francs.

The Financial Times reported that century bonds, which is an extreme way to borrow long term, “are highly unusual, although a flurry were sold during the period of very low interest rates that followed the financial crisis, including by governments such as Austria and Argentina.”

Big technology companies and suppliers are expected to invest nearly $700 billion in AI infrastructure this year, and are turning to the debt markets to finance data center build outs, per FT.

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