Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

abc.xyz

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 247 posts

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

#191

Post by sirsinsalot »

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 think Google is doing the right thing. Using LLMs for coding is the shiny low hanging fruit but it isn't what is going to make the tech ubiquitous. That'll be finding applications of it to real data problems.

Google knows LLMs are the new UI, not the new IDE.

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

#194

Post by rvba »

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…

Alphabet still cant fix search in Android Play store, so it works

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

#195

Post by lanthissa »

mitchell_h wrote: post #23
bel8 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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.

flash 3.5 is the best price/performance model for what i'm doing. I had been using opus for everything but as we started running many agents at once, and then eventually agent managing sub agents frontier is not an option.

we started model testing the cost/performance of our skills and agents and flash 3.5 wins in most things.

As people develop harnesses for their codebase i think the intelligence required comes down a lot.

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

#196

Post by lanthissa »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #67
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.

It's genuinely interesting to see Google fund this with equity versus debt.

Just as a google shareholder, this company bought back shares hand over fist at a low p/e for a few years, issues 100 year debt at low rates, and is selling equity when its at a premium to its peers right before 2-3 major ipos of competitors put selling pressure on the stock for a while.

I don't know who's going to win the llm battle, but googles finance team has been doing their job fantastically.

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

#197

Post by lanthissa »

panarky wrote: post #97
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's genuinely interesting to see Google fund this with equity versus debt.

It's also interesting watching Alphabet buy back $100 billion of stock over the last two years, when the price was half what it is today, only to turn around and sell shares now at the higher price. I know GAAP accounting won't recognize any capital gain on these treasury operations, but from an economic standpoint this financial judo creates a lot of value for existing shareholders.

this is the finance team doing a fantastic job. keep in mind they're raising this cash right before 3 major ipos in their sector which people will need to raise money for and will fight against htem in the narrative.

If i was a google cfo and was trading at a premium to my peers before that, i'd want to raise the cash now. Look at MSFT, they're trading at 25 forward p/e and were buying back shares at 40. If they have to issue equity over the next few years the spread between teh performance of the 2 cfos could be 40-50b on that alone.

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

#198

Post by Snafuh »

gmerc wrote: post #190
Saline9515 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs still need a search API, and use it a lot. Google is well positioned to earn from this service, especially if they can prove that their search service is superior to competitors. While they lose some of their moat, they are well positioned to dominate the market, just like they did in the consumer space.

That’s not what claude code does… and that’s exactly the dilemma for Google.

Claude Code is not the majority of AI usage.

People asking any AI chat interface for ideas for their honeymoon will trigger some kind of search. SEO is still relevant and Google might still be able to sell top spots in their search so LLMs will pick it up.

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

#199

Post by swores »

marysol5 wrote: post #172
Saline9515 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs still need a search API, and use it a lot. Google is well positioned to earn from this service, especially if they can prove that their search service is superior to competitors. While they lose some of their moat, they are well positioned to dominate the market, just like they did in the consumer space.

Yeah but LLM's don't offer you an advert. "You tried to find a recipe for cupcakes, well all I can offer you is an advert on kitchen appliances"

> "LLM's don't offer you an advert."

Some already do, and some of the ones that don't will in the future.

See for example https://help.openai.com/en/articles/20001047-ads-in-chatgpt

Of course that's not to say that the advertising situation will be identical to that of pre-LLM search engines, and the differences may lead to radically different economic models and user experiences. But I was just correcting your statement.

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

#200

Post by owebmaster »

riffraff wrote: post #163
topkai22 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

indeed, I know this is not actually AGI, I know it hallucinates and it's not reliable in all situations, buy any of today's LLMs would appear magical to anyone from 20 years ago.

It appears magical to us too. It just gets boring fast and the same would happen with the people from 20 years ago
Post reply on HN