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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

#81

Post by tempest_ »

Tuna-Fish wrote: post #58
tempest_ wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have not tried the Gemini CLI in a few months but when I did it was a shit show. Google makes it very hard to use their shit and it was full of bugs. Anthropic's current run is based entirely around Claude Code in this space and the last time I used the gemeini-cli it wouldnt give me access to the latest models and I was paying them for the privilege

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

So they did.

https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli/discussions/2727...

I get the complaints in that thread but I still think it is hilarious. That repo is a gong show to random shit and perhaps one of the best worst examples of "opensource" LLM development.

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

#82

Post by tracerbulletx »

m463 wrote: post #71
afavour wrote: post #69

It’s difficult to avoid the feeling that a horrible financial reckoning is on the way. All these big tech firms are spending wildly to make sure they are the one on top at the end of it all. But whoever that ends up being there’s going to be one hell of a lot of fallout underneath them.

Personally I wonder if these AI services will have a different price soon. Like how the early railroads or oil companies shook out and cost more than expected.

Maybe, but inference costs can come down too with more purpose built hardware and continual optimization and quantization strategies.

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

#83

Post by ecommerceguy »

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…

pretty sure its only for videos with cc enabled.

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

#84

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

afavour wrote: post #69

It’s difficult to avoid the feeling that a horrible financial reckoning is on the way. All these big tech firms are spending wildly to make sure they are the one on top at the end of it all. But whoever that ends up being there’s going to be one hell of a lot of fallout underneath them.

I don't understand where this $80B, +$150B for SpaceX, +$??B for each Anthropic and OpenAI is going to come from.

There's not that much cash sitting around.

Something is gonna need to get sold to transfer into those assets.

Unless central banks are just going to print money to invest in these companies, I don't know who else is going to be able to take on enough debt to prevent massive sell offs somewhere for this.

It's not like ~$400B is pocket change...

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

#86

Post by impulser_ »

afavour wrote: post #69

It’s difficult to avoid the feeling that a horrible financial reckoning is on the way. All these big tech firms are spending wildly to make sure they are the one on top at the end of it all. But whoever that ends up being there’s going to be one hell of a lot of fallout underneath them.

Yeah, but Google has the money for this. They are quite literally the most profitable company in the world. They are only raising because they don't want to harm there other businesses buy eating up their capital for this.

Why do you think there will only be one winner?

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

#87

Post by losvedir »

iamacyborg wrote: post #35
cj wrote: 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

Most of the economy is not journalists or people who sell "content" online. In most cases I can think of - retailer, restaurant, hotel, plumber, any local small business, they want their content ingested. That means the AI chatbot knows about them and they can be in answers potentially.

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

#88

Post by gizajob »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #66
hattmall wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's more that they know they can eventually clone any successes the other companies have and steal their market share. Their really is no moat. In a more normal environment they would be buyout candidates but that's a bit too far gone at this point, so you just let them run until they are out of gas and Google can benefit from any advances without upfronting the cost. Even with anthropics record breaking revenue gro…

> they know they can eventually clone any successes the other companies have Google has gone all in on AI. To the point of challenging their own core product. Apple is waiting and seeing. Google is building and distributing, albeit with terrible marketing.

Apple isn’t waiting and seeing on the hardware side, only implementing AI on the software side, which there doesn’t seem to be much of a demand for them to do. Apple are well set for on-device LLMs and agents with their Mx Max cpu/gpu, and their wait on the rest is saving them hundreds of billions by not burning all their profitability to the ground building Nvidia-filled datacenters the same as everyone else, which is why Google is now having to hunt for extra money by raising capital like this.

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

#89

Post by impulser_ »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #84
afavour wrote: post #69

It’s difficult to avoid the feeling that a horrible financial reckoning is on the way. All these big tech firms are spending wildly to make sure they are the one on top at the end of it all. But whoever that ends up being there’s going to be one hell of a lot of fallout underneath them.

I don't understand where this $80B, +$150B for SpaceX, +$??B for each Anthropic and OpenAI is going to come from. There's not that much cash sitting around. Something is gonna need to get sold to transfer into those assets. Unless central banks are just going to print money to invest in these companies, I don't know who else is going to be able to take on enough debt to prevent massive sell offs somewhere for this. I…

I don't think you understand the size of the US capital market. We are talking probably ~150 trillion.

It's easy as fuck for Google to raise this money because they are a money printing business. They are the most profitable company in the world, so for anyone this is basically the same as buying US debt.

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

#90

Post by hollerith »

nostrademons wrote: post #27
addaon wrote: 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…

First-order, yes. In practice there's a lot of issues with asymmetric information. The company knows its own operations and financial position better than random traders on Wall Street. It is rational for it to buy back stock when the market value is lower than the true intrinsic value of the company, and to sell stock when the market value is higher than the true intrinsic value of the company. Therefore, traders of…

I agree, and traders will also take into account the fact that there is a gold rush going on (into AI) and consequently view this issuance as not as much of a sign that company management believes that the stock is expensive as they would have if no gold rush were going on.
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