Google’s parent company is going on a borrowing spree to fund its AI ambitions — including through a rare 100-year bond.
Alphabet is lining up various offerings in dollars, Swiss francs and British pounds. No tech company has sold a century bond since IBM during the late 1990s dotcom frenzy; ultra-long-term bonds, issued by governments, were more common when interest rates were lower, as a way to lock in cheap borrowing costs.
Big Tech firms are spending heavily in the quest to dominate the AI age — Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft could collectively spend close to $700 billion on AI buildout this year — and the bond market is increasingly funding that outlay: Oracle last week garnered record demand for a $25 billion bond sale.