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 eating their pie.
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 is extraordinarily difficult to manage - they have to incentivise the new tech that is actively harming the current revenues, while maintaining as much of the old revenues as possible, without creating internal conflict between these two parts of the organisation that will kill it.
Though in fairness to Google they do seem to realise this and are trying to adapt - they're letting the LLM folks mess with search. It'll be interesting to see how this goes.
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 image generation model (certainly for speed, and for a while for accuracy) and have innovated with features like deep research
They are monetizing their ai conversations more effectively than OpenAI could dream of via ads and chat in Google search.
They are heavily investing in compute and talent.
When they've added llm results to Google search it has _increased_ engagement and re-engagement.
What part of the competition are they blissfully ignoring?
(I have counter arguments to some of these points, but I would rather hear other people's)
I heard Google search volumes by humans were declining, but I can't find the reference now so may be wrong. It's definitely changing the entire SEO industry.
Are they actually implementing ads in chat yet? I haven't seen an ad in Gemini yet.
Again, the results I've seen is that LLM results in search have resulted in more zero-click searches (as a proportion of all searches), which isn't increasing engagement? But again, I may be wrong, what are you basing your assertion on?
I didn't say they were blissfully ignoring anything. I gave them credit for knowing the situation they're in and doing something about it.
The problem that I was talking about (probably badly getting my point across) is that it's internal conflict and strife that causes the pain here. One part of the company is incentivised on increasing revenue on the existing business. The other part of the company is incentivised on increasing revenue for the new business. But the new business is at the expense of the old business, so it sets up internal conflict where each part of the business tries to protect its own incentives. And Google has always been afflicted with rife internal politics.
Google search related ad revenue is still going up. Volume isn't everything. Personally, as llms have gotten better I do more and more product research on Google.
Even if they include ads in Gemini the issue is that Gemini is not the best AI app. It’s maybe the 3rd or 4th. So if Google becomes the 3rd best “search/AI engine” the future is not that bright.
The thing about Innovator's Dilemma is that even if you know about it you mostly cannot escape your own company culture and norms.
If there is a "crack" there you might be able to get out of it, or it will let a disruptive idea to grow, but my way of thinking about innovator's dilemma is that is it a "culture bias": knowing about it give you some small advantage but it needs a real change to maybe have a chance to escape/act on it and the most important part is that under pressure it will quickly and imperceptible run the entire process or decision making.
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
This take overlooks most of the work that Google has been doing in the past decade.
Have you seen their Cloud business?
Moreover, Google has continued to drive search growth since ChatGPT arrived and is executing competently. Their models are good (not great), but they have enough compute and one of the best ML-focused chips such that they aren't beholden to Nvidia (instead, they're beholden to fabs: tsmc - this is a much better dependency since Nvidia is hell bent on extracting as much value as they can from their position in the stack and it would be against the nature of tsmc to behave similarly)
Will Google's ad revenue decrease? Advertising is an incredible business because it is anti fragile.^ Even if search revenues decrease from their current highs (I would bet heavily against this), they still have YouTube with shorts and a robust display ads business that is going to improve if AI supercharges the economy (more companies - # startups founded in Jan 2026 is much higher than # founded the previous January, more products, advertising and distribution become the differentiators for these products)
If you're wondering how anthropic is going to continue to grow its base, the answer is advertising. In fact, Google is situated to fundamentally support everything that anthropic needs. Who cares if they make worse margins than anthropic? They'll benefit from the entire ride up, and they'll do the same for the next startup of that scale.
Google doesn't seem to "get" agentic autonomy. Their models are trained to solve short problems really well, but they get confused over long time horizon tasks and kinda suck at tool calling to boot.
> 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.
a bit more nuanced take on the failure would also account for executives backgrounds at the critical period:
- in 1981 Vince Barabba — Kodak's Head of Market Intelligence — conducted an extensive internal study that explicitly concluded digital photography could replace film and that Kodak had approximately 10 years to prepare for the transition.
- Kodak's leadership in 1980–1993 saw the company through the lens of its founding identity — silver-halide chemitry, precision coating and manufacturing, and the extraordinarily high margins of the film-plus-processing business. This identity-driven decade was spent on failed diversification and defending film instead of building an electronics cost structure and a defensible high-margin position. They steered capital and attention toward businesses that fit that self-image (specialty chemicals, pharmaceuticals, hybrid film products) rather than toward digital cameras, which meant fighting Sony and Canon on low-margin electronics turf where Kodak felt no competence and feared cannibalizing film.
- It was an inside executive culture, crystallized in the 1990 choice of film-lifer Kay Whitmore over the digital-minded Phil Samper. When Chandler retired, the finalists were Whitmore and vice-chairman Phil Samper, who had a deep appreciation for digital technology. The board chose Whitmore, and was explicit about why: as the New York Times reported, Whitmore said he would keep Kodak closer to its core businesses in film and photographic chemicals. Samper resigned and went on to become president of Sun Microsystems and then CEO of Cray Research — i.e., to lead exactly the kind of digital/computing companies Kodak was avoiding becoming.
- so when Kodak did get serious to compete in digital (in 1993 board made Fisher the CEO, he came from running Motorola and held an engineering degree plus a doctorate in applied mathematics) it did so as one commodity hardware maker among many and that was too late since film began to drop as digital started to pick up, exactly as Vince Barabba predicted in 1981
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.
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.
so the argument here is that its too niche for google to care ? i dont belive that they made explicit decision to make a lame version of claude code that their own devs dont use.
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.
These people know about the innovator's dilemma. Their problem is incompetent product and people management, same as it has always been. Talk to anybody working on Gemini, and it's obvious that they're wasting a tremendous amount of effort and talent.
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.
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 overview" pill in that case.
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.
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
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.
I think Google is a bit sandbagging here knowing they have all the data and likely better models hiding. My theory is it's a bit of not disrupting the stock market direction by exposing whose really the boss. If they can do it cheaper, faster, and better, people start asking questions, especially with upcoming IPO's.
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.
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 growth I don't see how the pure AI companies can sustain, but the catch-22 is that any obvious pivot proves that. This puts the more traditional tech companies in position to ride the back of the wave until the growth curve tops.
Coding is a pretty small slice of the markets in play. Google's models are driving cars right now. Using coding agents doesn't give much insight into performance in the broader world; I would assume assume Google is performing better in general even if Claude or Codex is currently outperforming for coding.
It's important to remember that the cloud division, rapidly becoming Google's golden goose, does not give one fuck about Gemini and would happily sell out all of Gemini's compute to Anthropic and OAI if given the opportunity.
Google doesn't suck at LLMs, they suck at customer service. There was a period where Gemini Pro was the best LLM out there, before they gutted it with quantization. It's like they didn't realize that "provide a great product, get people hooked then cut the quality" doesn't work when switching costs are so low. As with GCP, putting the wants of SREs over the wants of customers is not how you gain lots of customers.
I don't think they 'index' videos, per se. They just point the model at the video's transcript on demand when you ask a question, I believe. Doesn't change any of your conclusions, though. You're absolutely right, they have an absolute ton of data.
I'm actually impressed by how much the Hackernews crowd is sleeping on Google & Gemini. Yes, it's lagging behind in coding, but it's consistently much better and more reliable at literally everything else.
Also there was a period of time when Gemini was the best model out there...
I would have assumed that it was like 50%... I always assume everyone knows how to code or is code adjacent in some way. Remind me to go for a walk today...
Some of the stuff that turns up on Googlebot, you really have to think "where on earth did you find that? Absolutely nobody, nowhere had a hyperlink to that"
> 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".
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.
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.
Google has been diabolical with forming teams to develop a product, then disbanding the team, and then moonlighting the product right after deployment.
cries in Google Glass
Wild that Meta has that product now decades later, which isn't even half of what Google offered.
You are assuming that Play store search is even broken from their perspective. I bet all their internal signals on it are positive, as in they make money on the fraud and scams, and crack down occasionally just enough to retain user trust.
How good is YT's data though? Have you seen their Auto Caption? It's utterly incapable of understanding speech.
Auto Dubbing on the other hand is incredible, translating Russian/Ukranian speech with different voices and accents for each speaker, during a fire fight is wild.
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.
It’s not easy to buy such a large tranche of shares at a fixed and fair price in a single transaction!
Both parties get something they want this transaction. Alphabet gets the Berkshire halo effect and a guaranteed buyer of $10 billion worth of equities, Berkshire gets a large tranche of equity at a price they believe is fair.
I think they view Alphabet as their next Apple, and a relatively safe place to ride out whatever happens with AI: Alphabet is fairly well positioned for the upturn or the downturn, especially now with this expanded warchest of cash.
They are buying 10B$ 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.
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.
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?
> The ATM program is intended primarily to facilitate, for a period of time, an administrative
change in how Alphabet meets tax obligations associated with employee equity grants. This
approach will mimic a “sell to cover” model: upon vesting of restricted stock units, shares will
still be delivered to employees net of taxes, and the company will use corporate cash to settle
taxes on behalf of employees. The company intends to issue stock for equivalent proceeds
through its ATM program.
This is an interesting change. Essentially just gives more timing control?
Question from an outsider: my perception is Google has lost $80b in excessive spending on teacups. I never thought I'd see them attempt to raise money, seems like they've always had an unlimited pile of it. Why is this necessary for them?
If they can issue shares at ~30x earnings and deploy it in an accretive way, what is the argument against doing this? It's incremental ROIC below your cost of capital. One of the smartest things you can do in business.
Offering shares doesn't introduce balance sheet risk like debt does. There is no interest expense. You dilute the shareholders by about 1.67% but if this $80b can be deployed in a way that increases the value of the firm by more than that amount over the long term, it creates value and makes everyone better off, including the diluted shareholders.
The risk if it doesn't work out is that everyone gets diluted 1.67%
Hh I didn't consider that. Produce more shares, have Berkshire buy them up at a lower price than the public, in exchange for capital right now. Berkshire can sell them for a profit later or participate in earnings. And with their shares at a premium right now, great time to do it.
They don't have the cash laying around. Their "actual" profit, meaning money added to their bank account after stock buy backs, dividends, employee stock allocations, and capex was $7B.
In this statement, their 2025 capex was $91.45B. They expect their 2026 capex to be $180B-190B. And they expect their "2027 capital expenditures to significantly
increase compared to 2026."
So they simply don't have the money. Up until now, I thought the bubble talks about AI were silly because all these companies were using cash flow to fund their capex. These numbers are so astronomical now that a company that had $132B in net income has to take debt or issue stock to pay for it.
I think you’re spot on.
If you think they know what they are doing, then why are they selling shares now instead of issuing debt? They must either be maxed out on debt issuance or believe the cost of equity (future equity returns) are low.
And Alphabet already has an established customer base / product infrastructure to roll out it's AI products, and is highly profitable. This makes it a far less risky investment than a loss-making start up. Berkshire seems to agree. It's a great power play that can only hinder competitor IPOs.
Set it on fire? I'm confused what your model of Google leadership is. Do you think they're being duped? Or controlled in some way? What is your theory of mind for Sundar's decision making process here. That he's committing fraud?
Because the obvious answer is that he has compelling financial data telling him that this $80B now will produce a positive return on investment in the future. But you of course seem to disagree.
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 (“mechanically”) share price neutral.
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 often treat buybacks as a signal that the company is "cheap" (at least in the company's own view) and pump up the price accordingly, and treat stock issuances as a sign that company management believes that the stock is "expensive" and push it down accordingly. Company management has more inside information than market participants do, but is usually prohibited from trading on it. Stock issuances and stock buybacks are one of the few cases where insider-initiated trading is legal, because the benefits accrue to the company as a whole rather than a few individuals.
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.
This is true in a "yes but" sense. Typically equities of the mega caps benefitted from debt issuance on the expectation it would accelerate growth. The change to equity value loss is what is interesting: the market no longer sees this as generating growth, at least not like it used to.
Ok but GOOG also has a ~$70B per year stock buyback program for that. It's a little goofy to be buying back and issuing $80B of new shares at the same time.
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 undervalued, so the market usually increases its estimation of value.
You watching all your neighbors sell their beachfront property right before hurricane season: "This isn't really a signal because these transactions are all zero-sum"
Supply and demand of Google equity. The fundamental value of a share doesn't change, but you now need more investor capacity to hold the equity. So you need to sell to investors who weren't quite willing to pay the previous price.
It's not based on the fundamental value of the stock so maybe you wouldn't consider it "first order," but I think you can still call it "mechanical."
Don't forget that the denominator (total number of outstanding shares) will be increased by this as well. So even if the market cap reacted exactly one to one like you're proposing the per share price wouldn't stay constant necessarily.
Sure but people are no longer expecting these kinds of actions to generate equity gains. Before it was expected the growth would outpace the cost of capital, leading to equity appreciation. The directional change is what is interesting.
Very interesting. Often I only perceive the stock market as existing equity changing hands and the stock value of the company not being immediately relevant for its success (it's just third parties trading ownership around, after all), but I rarely heard of cash raises for the company after the initial IPO - of course only because I didn't pay attention and mostly IPOs make the news.
It's insightful to put such documents into Claude and see how they use many different financial mechanisms to raise the money. $15B sold directly to the big banks, $40B sold to the market (but also facilitated by these banks), a direct investment (PIPE) from Berkshire. Pretty cool how financial markets do these things.
excluding IPO proceeds, existing public companies in the US raise about $200B a year through selling shares on stock markets. This DOES NOT include stock-based comp, which is simply another form of funding operations post-IPO using public markets.
Stock based comp is another $350B a year in US markets alone. So if you think about public markets as an avenue for companies to raise capital, post-IPO firms are doing it to the tune of more than half a trillion a year.
All these money spent on AI is simply mind boggling. Google expect to spend $1 Trillion over next few years. And that is not counting Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Tesla etc.
I would have thought we have over built Datacenter before even AI came. There are enough Datacenter Rack space that replacing 5 - 8 years old server to newer 256 Core CPU would have increased their CPU per Rack by factor of 4 - 5. Saving significant space for future growth.
Instead we are so behind in Rackspace we are now building out Datacenter faster than ever.
I think people don't understand that the value of the data generated by chats/agents is conservatively worth $200B a year. This is the so-called data-flywheel. Google is going to keep spending until they hit the break even point.
More than a quadrillion high quality tokens per year. Pretty soon they will have an automated team of scientists doing basic and advanced research in every field. All those tokens will be fed back and make the model much more inference efficient.
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.
> Yeah, but Google has the money for this. They are quite literally the most profitable company in the world.
"Alphabet announced that its 2026 capital expenditures are expected to be $180-$190 billion, and that it expects 2027 capital expenditures to significantly increase [...] over the 12 months ended March 31, 2026, Alphabet generated $174 billion of operating cash flow"
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.
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.
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 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.
1. There’s real profit/value expected in pursuing the full automation of the labor market to the extent that the Board will approve large debts to known allies (BH) who only invest in long term infrastructure.
So they are investing in more AI infrastructure with long term capital because they see the payoff in the long term.
2. That also means they aren’t doing market moving plays in public like selling corporate debt because they don’t want to be in the short term froth with a long term bet.
Capital is cheap for Google because they are making a lot of money and they have very little debt.
They are considered a very low risk and can borrow for a long time at low rates. They recently issued a 100 year bond.
They seem to have decided to issue equity rather than borrow more. This is probably so that they can maintain the ability to borrow very cheaply in future if necessary.
Sorry I am not buying into that. In your logic they should issue more debt. Their operating margin is lowest compared to Microsoft and meta. If oil goes to 200 tomorrow their profit margin will be squeezed most along with meta. (Ads) Backlog in cloud does not mean shit imo. They can slow roll it. Matter of fact half of that backlog seems backed by anthropic anyway. So imagine anthropic not making money because of a down turn and going down. Who will pay the backlog? This is exactly why they are diluting their stock instead of issuing more debt, they don't want to put all their eggs in one basket and want to retain capital for such downturn. That's how I read it.
They've already issued $80B in 6 markets/currencies. How much more do you think they can raise at a decent rate? I think they might issue more next year.
Issuing new equity might be a financial engineering experiment. No other mag7 has tried it. Plus they got BH name on the plate.
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.
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.
These companies have pivoted from being cash generation machines to being data center building companies. It’s a huge bet that might pay off but the market is starting to notice that where there used to be revenue generation there is now infrastructure spend.
Also I don’t think any of these companies has handled big capex programs in the past (maybe AWS a bit since Amazon is building things, but it did so incrementally), aka they don’t have the institutional knowledge to manage the risk associated with it.
If you're going to bring up CapEx, Cloud is entirely a CapEx vs OpEx play so AWS and GCP are entirely familiar with the risks there. AWS dates back to 2006 and Google was building data centers long before GCP was public. Smaller, sure, but their finance team understand CapEx and OpEx well.
I could have paid cash for my car, but that would have been a bad move. I wouldn’t have had any liquid assets left over for getting me through a rainy day. The interest I paid on the loan was an acceptable price for reducing my overall risk exposure.
Even if Alphabet has $80B sitting in the bank, they could quite reasonably arrive at a comparable decision.
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.