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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

#201

Post by swores »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #95
mgfist wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Google also owns 15% of anthropic.

Pedantic correction that doesn't change anything other than accuracy: it was reported over a year ago to be closer to 14% than 15%.

https://www.theverge.com/news/627849/auto-draft

But I believe since then Anthropic have raised more money, almost certainly diluting Google's stake (I could be wrong and misremembering that Google didn't partake in the additional fundraising). I have in the back of my head that Google is down to something like 10% now, but don't have time to go and find details to fact check that, sorry!

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

#202

Post by TacticalCoder »

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 actually impressed at how bad Alphabet is with LLMs ...

I'm still on Anthropic models to code but I'm on Gemini 3.5 Flash for everything else. How can you say Google is bad at LLM when their little flash model is literally SOTA on many benchmarks?

> ... yet OpenAI and Anthropic are eating their pie.

They're eating nobody's pie: it's a new pie. Google is a $4.5 trillion company, the 2nd biggest in the world as I type this.

Seen that fact and seen how good Gemini 3.5 Flash is, I'm not really sure Google is "bad at LLMs".

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

#203

Post by Yokohiii »

sounds wrote: post #144
H8crilA wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sm…

Yeah, for profitable companies, debt is a strategic tool not a desperate act. It more about orchestrating around the money that is soft locked somewhere else.

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

#204

Post by freedomben »

marysol5 wrote: post #175
pineapple_opus wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah this seems true. Claude Code are famously dubbed as best AI coding agent, but google doesn't care about that niche I guess. Somehow, I still rely on google search as they have diversified it. If you ask questions, it will enable "AI overview" , but if we search about particular object/platform like "Google stock" or "bbc news", it will give the old classic search experience and we woulnd't need to swallow "AI ov…

I tried using Gemini CLI to sort some code issues for me, ran out of tokens mid-way through, even though I have Gemini Pro. Turns out licensing is separate for "code" and "pro"...

Same happened to me. That was the death knell for Gemini as a coding agent to me. I even paid for a whole year...

I highly suspect they opaquely lowered usage limits on me.

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

#205

Post by christkv »

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.

Why are they able to do this without offering it to the market being a public company.

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

#206

Post by aethelraed »

SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #118
jgalt212 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

in high margin businesses, customer acquisition is everything.

If your product becomes commoditized, it’s no longer a high margin business

You can have a high accounting margin and a product with price equal to economic marginal cost—externalities, cost of capital, barriers to entry… DRAM is a commodity but has (currently) a high margin.

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

#207

Post by cmiles8 »

christkv wrote: post #205
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.

Why are they able to do this without offering it to the market being a public company.

These special placements are essentially a form of financing.

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

#208

Post by freedomben »

Snafuh wrote: post #198
gmerc wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

exactly. Claude is in a niche. It's a high-value niche right now, but a niche nonetheless. Normies don't use claude much based on the numbers I saw. Search is still highly relevant and Google seems well positioned to capitalize on it.

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

#209

Post by Tuna-Fish »

throwawaycan wrote: post #132
Tuna-Fish wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google trashed the Gemini CLI client and replaced it with agy (antigravity), which is written in go and is much nicer.

Interesting you say that. Every user I speak to says antigravity cli is missing lots of features and Gemini cli was working quite well. Same for me.

It's not as feature rich, but has also not crashed once for me, unlike gemini cli, which was a flickery, unstable mess.

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

#210

Post by dominotw »

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…

> What part of the competition are they blissfully ignoring?

coding models? their own devs use claude code.

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