Alphabet shocked Wall Street last week with its plan to devote between $175 billion and $185 billion to capital expenditures this year — and the Google parent company just gave a signal of how it plans to pay for that.
The cloud and search giant completed a $20 billion U.S. bond offering on Monday, according to a person with direct knowledge of the financing. That comes on the heels of Oracle’s monster $25 billion debt financing a week ago. And the latest deal could be followed by something highly unusual: Bloomberg reported that Alphabet is planning subsequent bond deals in Europe that could include100-year maturities.
Alphabet’s U.S. offering drew more than $100 billion in demand, according to Informa Global Markets, and it included notes with maturities that range from three years to 40 years. The 40-year bonds had a 5.75% coupon.
Alphabet didn’t respond to a MarketWatch request for comment.
The prospect of a 100-year tranche would be unconventional because it is difficult to predict the staying power of technology so many decades out. Bond offerings from Oracle and Meta Platforms were already viewed as unusual because they both included 40-year tranches, something that tech companies once eschewed.
Shares of Alphabet fell last week after the company unveiled its spending forecast for the year. While Alphabet is viewed as a top artificial-intelligence player due to assets like its rapidly growing Google Cloud business and its increasingly popular Gemini AI model, investors are keenly aware that getting ahead — or staying ahead — comes at a high cost. Alphabet reported $91 billion in capital spending for 2025, meaning that its expenditures could roughly double this year.
The company also has pared back share repurchases while it dedicates ever more money to the purchase of AI hardware.
The Alphabet bond offering comes during a choppy stretch for the AI trade. Not only are investors worried about the spending required to advance the technology, but they’re also concerned that new AI tools could upend the business models of traditional software vendors.
The tumult hasn’t been only in stocks, however. The chart below shows spreads of bonds issued by several major software companies widening by about 14 basis points relative to other segments of the U.S. investment-grade corporate-bond market, as a result of AI-related jitters.
Photo: BofA Global
Shares of Alphabet rose nearly 0.5% on Monday, while the iShares Expanded Tech-Software Sector ETF was up about 3.2%.
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