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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

#141

Post by ApolloFortyNine »

bel8 wrote: post #17
plmpsu wrote: 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'm guessing one goal of the semi recent AI translated subtitles on every video, is now every video has a transcription.

It's actually incredibly useful if you just want to summarize a video, or my use case, want a text tutorial of something that's a video.

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

#143

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

bel8 wrote: post #17
plmpsu wrote: 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…

My guess: The company culture means that the best people went to other companies.

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

#144

Post by sounds »

H8crilA wrote: post #11
swiftcoder wrote: post #4

How is Alphabet suddenly short of capital?

Latest filing, as of end of March 2026, shows $126.8B in total cash, cash equivalents, and marketable securities: https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/0001652044/0... I guess they don't want to burn it down to $40B?

Not all cash is fungible for CapEx. For instance, much of that might hypothetically be held in an offshore account. Building a datacenter with it would trigger unfavorable VAT or sales tax or something... Hypothetically...

High cap companies use debt for this: bank loan is located in the market where it's needed most, and the debt is serviced by interest earned from securities in other markets. The net taxes are a small percent (think 3%) relative to simply transferring funds within the company. Yes, this is the low effective tax rate the EU is quite upset about.

Other reasons for not touching their holdings usually have a similar explanation. The securities are fungible for accounting purposes but not fungible enough for actual day-to-day operations. Result: securities get "stranded" and the large company grows a hedge fund appendage.

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

#146

Post by [deleted] »

lemax wrote: post #65
mitchell_h wrote: post #23

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'm quite certain that Google's AI services are likely the most used in the world right now by virtue of having the widest distribution. It's in the search box. It's on your Android phone. Just because they aren't the preferred coding or research agent does not mean they are losing - that's a pretty small slice.

[deleted]

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

#147

Post by asdfaoeu »

B-Con wrote: post #104
tptacek wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I mean, you'd expect this move to mechanically push share prices down.

They added $80 out of a $4.5T market cap, which means redistributing ~1.67% of value from shares outstanding to the new shares. So being down 1.7% is literally exactly what you'd expect.

Not at all since the company is also +80bn cash.

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

#148

Post by asdfaoeu »

fancyfredbot wrote: post #57
paulddraper wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In theory a dividend is also price neutral. You have the dividend now but the company you owned doesn't any more. However, if someone gives you a dividend you typically have to pay tax, and lots of people really hate paying tax. So buybacks are the preferred price neutral way of dealing with excess cash.

Dividends are absolutely not price neutral however most feeds correct for them.

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

#149

Post by isomorphic_duck »

topkai22 wrote: post #116
an0malous wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Especially because LLMs have no moat and they’re strategy is basically “we’ll figure out AGI first”

I feel there is a strong argument that if we described the capabilities of agentic systems today to someone from 2002, they’d say we’ve achieved AGI. It’s just not as impressive as we thought it would be. At least not yet.

I would say continual learning is the big missing piece that someone even from 2002 would realise.

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

#150

Post by swiftcoder »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #79
whatever1 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think I agree. Cloud has not faced (yet) a serious downturn. I can invest perfectly in an always up market.

> Cloud has not faced (yet) a serious downturn 2008 wasn't a serious downturn?

GCP didn't launch until 2008, and AWS was only a small cluster of core services before that point. I don't think it fair to say that either platform really had to weather that crisis
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