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Alphabet announces $80B equity capital raise to expand AI infra and compute

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Re: Alphabet announces $80B equity capital raise to expand AI infra and compute

#41
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? Every business owner I know outside of HN wants to be discoverable by LLMs.

Being discoverable is one thing, having your content stolen wholesale is another

And having your content rendered inaccessible to humans by a DDoS attack from overly aggressive webcrawlers that ignore robots.txt is yet another.

Re: Alphabet announces $80B equity capital raise to expand AI infra and compute

#42
post #17
post #6

Quoting: In addition, Alphabet has reached an agreement to sell $10 billion of stock to Berkshire Hathaway Inc. in a private placement, comprised of $5 billion in Class A Common Stock at a price of $351.81 per share and $5 billion in Class C Capital Stock at a price of $348.20 per share. This investment by Berkshire Hathaway adds to the position it has built since Q3 2025.

They know Google has a ton of data to train LLMs on. Recently I have been asking YouTube's new AI about some videos ("when is Steam metrics mentioned in the video?" for example), which means they also index videos. This is an unthinkable amount of data. I'm actually impressed at how bad Alphabet is with LLMs since they invented the thing as we know AND have all the data to train on, yet OpenAI and Anthropic are eatin…

I don't think they 'index' videos, per se. They just point the model at the video's transcript on demand when you ask a question, I believe. Doesn't change any of your conclusions, though. You're absolutely right, they have an absolute ton of data.

Re: Alphabet announces $80B equity capital raise to expand AI infra and compute

#43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t raise money because you’re short on capital. You raise when you’re in a position of power and capital is cheap.

Or if you think that you may not be able to raise this kind of money if the AI story goes down after all these IPOs

Both of these tell the actual market position:

1. There’s real profit/value expected in pursuing the full automation of the labor market to the extent that the Board will approve large debts to known allies (BH) who only invest in long term infrastructure.

So they are investing in more AI infrastructure with long term capital because they see the payoff in the long term.

2. That also means they aren’t doing market moving plays in public like selling corporate debt because they don’t want to be in the short term froth with a long term bet.

Re: Alphabet announces $80B equity capital raise to expand AI infra and compute

#44
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use anthropic's models daily, and sometimes switch to Gemini. Google is losing the marketing front BADLY, but their AI service is surprisingly great. It's far cheaper than anthropic for one. and for my kind of research it's just better.

I think Google is a bit sandbagging here knowing they have all the data and likely better models hiding. My theory is it's a bit of not disrupting the stock market direction by exposing whose really the boss. If they can do it cheaper, faster, and better, people start asking questions, especially with upcoming IPO's.

This makes no sense. Google is beholden to its own shareholders, not the markets at large.

In any case, it's well known that devs in Google have liked anthropic/openai models for coding more than gemini, so unless they're hiding their best models from the people within, I think it's just the case that they're behind.

Re: Alphabet announces $80B equity capital raise to expand AI infra and compute

#45

How is Alphabet suddenly short of capital?

You don’t raise money because you’re short on capital. You raise when you’re in a position of power and capital is cheap.

Capital is cheap how? Are you saying they think capital would get more expensive?

Re: Alphabet announces $80B equity capital raise to expand AI infra and compute

#46
post #18
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? There’s $80B of dilution from new shares issued, so to keep share prices constant market cap would have to increase by $80B. Simultaneously, there $80B in additional assets on the balance sheet, so if the company was previously correctly valued at $N market cap it would now be correctly valued at $N+$80B market cap, right? My intuition is that capital raises, just like stock buybacks, should be first-order (“mec…

But stock buybacks shouldn't be price-neutral by default? The entire point is to increase the unit price of the remaining shares. And in this specific case, selling shares to Berkshire at a 5% discount has a pretty clear signalling effect.

In theory a buyback is price neutral.

The company has less cash in the balance sheet, so its market cap decreases. But there are fewer shares, so the share price is the same.

(This allows hypothetical future growth to disproportionately benefit existing shareholders, but does not intrinsically increase stock price.)

In practice, like another poster pointed out, it signals the company’s belief that its own shares are undervalued, so the market usually increases its estimation of value.

Re: Alphabet announces $80B equity capital raise to expand AI infra and compute

#47
Very interesting. Often I only perceive the stock market as existing equity changing hands and the stock value of the company not being immediately relevant for its success (it's just third parties trading ownership around, after all), but I rarely heard of cash raises for the company after the initial IPO - of course only because I didn't pay attention and mostly IPOs make the news.

It's insightful to put such documents into Claude and see how they use many different financial mechanisms to raise the money. $15B sold directly to the big banks, $40B sold to the market (but also facilitated by these banks), a direct investment (PIPE) from Berkshire. Pretty cool how financial markets do these things.

Re: Alphabet announces $80B equity capital raise to expand AI infra and compute

#49
post #25

[flagged]

> It is odd that they cite customer demand just after people leave Google for DuckDuckGo due to AI enshittification. You’ll probably find this is extremely limited to whatever circle you find yourself in

The other thing people do is associate google only with their consumer facing products. Their cloud business is growing like crazy and they have the best Ai chips for running efficiently/economically at scale (TPUs, vertical integration). There's a reason they run everyone's models better than they can themselves on nvidia cards

Re: Alphabet announces $80B equity capital raise to expand AI infra and compute

#50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or if you think that you may not be able to raise this kind of money if the AI story goes down after all these IPOs

Both of these tell the actual market position: 1. There’s real profit/value expected in pursuing the full automation of the labor market to the extent that the Board will approve large debts to known allies (BH) who only invest in long term infrastructure. So they are investing in more AI infrastructure with long term capital because they see the payoff in the long term. 2. That also means they aren’t doing market mo…

They already have shitloads corp debt. They don't want to over leverage.
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