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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

#151

Post by imtringued »

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…

Youtube has had AI generated transcripts with autotranslation for the subtitles for years, not to mention the forced AI dubbing on mobile phones.

Doing a little bit of RAG on the transcript hardly sounds impressive.

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

#152

Post by HDThoreaun »

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.

Only if shareholders think google is gonna light the money on fire

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

#153

Post by keeda »

wrsh07 wrote: post #130
marcus_holmes wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kodak problem. Kodak invented the digital camera but their revenue came from making photographic film. They were unable to take advantage of their invention because it would cannibalise their revenue. That didn't stop other people and the revenue died anyway. Google's main revenue is ads based on search. LLMs are a competitor to search. Creating better LLMs will cut into search volumes. In any large organisation this…

This is a sensible-seeming take at first blush, but it doesn't hold up to any scrutiny (or maybe my scrutiny is faulty - you tell me!) Sundar and many of his executives have certainly read or heard of The Innovator's Dilemma, and I expect they're all moderately paranoid that it will be their downfall. Also, that's not it. Google has a great ai app called Gemini where they have at various points hosted the top ai imag…

I agree that all of today's CEOs have learned from history and are paranoid about disruption, and I agree that Google is pivoting effectively and will even thrive in the AI era, given their technical and distribution advantages... but I think their revenues and profits and dominance will be much lower than what they are today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47957708

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

#154

Post by minraws »

ip26 wrote: post #126
jamestimmins wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My first thought was my finance professor telling us that companies always raise with equity when they think their equity is overvalued.

You’d think Berkshire would be at least passingly aware of that principle, though.

They are buying 10B$ worth of shares for 10% discount from current valuation, and if their goal is to hold for 10-20 years, then it could be a good hedged buy in favour of AI.

Even if AI crashes 90% SpaceX, OpenAI & Anthropic are worth say 200B each post IPO. In 10-20 years with similar effects to Internet they might be the next Meta. Apple, Microsoft of the world.

But Google will likely still be the leader if it can make good on it's advantages.

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

#155

Post by quantumink »

isomorphic_duck wrote: post #149
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.

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

[dead]

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

#156

Post by nimchimpsky »

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…

[dead]

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

#157

Post by sayamqazi »

isomorphic_duck wrote: post #149
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.

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

tbf producing coherent answers to questions (even if sometimes inaccurate) was perceived to be an almost impossible task a decade ago.

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

#158

Post by alecco »

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…

> They know Google has a ton of data to train LLMs on.

And they have a massive amounts of TPUs. And yet... their models are way behind.

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

#159

Post by [deleted] »

pm90 wrote: post #115
swyx wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

google stock is $376 a share rn. berkshire got a favorable discount here. is this... normal? they didnt have an obligation to offer it to the market to find the best price?

if they sold that much in the open market it would probably decrease the price

[deleted]
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