Quoting:<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.
who cares about marketing when you have distribution? Probably a smart move to pump dollars into the product and not the marketing.
I have not tried the Gemini CLI in a few months but when I did it was a shit show.<p>Google makes it very hard to use their shit and it was full of bugs.<p>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 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.
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.
This makes no sense. Google is beholden to its own shareholders, not the markets at large.<p>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.
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 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.<p>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.
Google also owns 15% of anthropic.
Is it? My mom and all her friends use "the intelligence". What is it? Gemini, because it's on their android phone.
I wouldn't be surprised if Google's logs alone are a substantial portion of all data created daily...
I've also asked the youtube ai about when some things are mentioned in videos, and upon verification the ai is just hallucinating.
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.
Are you sure it’s not using transcripts? That would be equally useful but technologically less impressive.
pretty sure its only for videos with cc enabled.
Everyone mocked them for paying for YouTube for years with no real income. Now it’s the most valuable data source in the world.
Not only that, but the same webmasters who try to shoo AI crawlers away actively court Google's bots.
It's genuinely interesting to see Google fund this with equity versus debt.
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.<p>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.
Really? lol.<p>Tech firms should always have a buffer and never get too close to the optimal debt ratio.<p>I think they have learned a lot re. what happens if you are asleep at the wheel now.
It’s difficult to avoid the feeling that a horrible financial reckoning is on the way.<p>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.<p>Why do you think there will only be one winner?
Especially because LLMs have no moat and they’re strategy is basically “we’ll figure out AGI first”
Personally I wonder if these AI services will have a different price soon.<p>Like how the early railroads or oil companies shook out and cost more than expected.
I don't understand where this $80B, +$150B for SpaceX, +$??B for each Anthropic and OpenAI is going to come from.<p>There's not that much cash sitting around.<p>Something is gonna need to get sold to transfer into those assets.<p>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.<p>It's not like ~$400B is pocket change...
(1) There is currently $1T in dry powder in private capital markets<p>(2) Middle east oil money (Saudi Aramco's <i>profit</i> every year is $100B+)<p>(3) Public traders have been and are looking to cycle out of other investments into higher growth areas.
I don't think you understand the size of the US capital market. We are talking probably ~150 trillion.<p>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.
> 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.<p>This is an interesting change. Essentially just gives more timing control?
Link to the FWP (Free Writing Prospectus): <a href="https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000119312526251733/d160205dfwp.htm" rel="nofollow">https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000119312526...</a>
Interesting timing with the Spacex/Anthropic/OpenAI ipos coming up
Interesting how the market has reacted to this news (down 1.7% after hours)
so, at a 8% discount at current prices.
How is Alphabet suddenly short of capital?
You don’t raise money because you’re short on capital. You raise when you’re in a position of power and capital is cheap.
Latest filing, as of end of March 2026, shows $126.8B in total cash, cash equivalents, and marketable securities:<p><a href="https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/0001652044/000165204426000048/goog-20260331.htm#i26b1b03449a346688a951eb5656ee1ac_19" rel="nofollow">https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/0001652044/0...</a><p>I guess they don't want to burn it down to $40B?
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.
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.<p>Even if Alphabet has $80B sitting in the bank, they could quite reasonably arrive at a comparable decision.
Preparing for acquisitions?
Nobody has the capital to casually invest 200B PER YEAR, in cash, for multiple years.<p>Literally nobody.
The market wants to put money into AI.<p>The market thinks Alphabet is most able to efficiently turn $80B into more money by investing in AI infrastructure.<p>So, Alphabet is happy to oblige them, given the favorable terms.
Are we watching the same AI capex spending choices over the last 1-2 years?<p>Every company from megacorps to small fish are spending well in excess of profits on these capex expansions. No ROI timelines yet established....
so google had spent too much money to build their own datacenter?
We will soon see "improved" 'AI Mode' most likely.
They have to do it now. After the probable IPO failures of SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic no one will give them money.<p>It is odd that they cite customer demand just after people leave Google for DuckDuckGo due to AI enshittification.
Hey 3 hour old account, how will we keep you accountable when they successfully IPO? Like I am a downer on these companies too but idiots are lining up to buy.
> It is odd that they cite customer demand just after people leave Google for DuckDuckGo due to AI enshittification.<p>You’ll probably find this is extremely limited to whatever circle you find yourself in
As long as the default on Chrome, Firefox, and Safari is Google, I doubt any of this "retaliatory flight" registers as even a blip.
The other thing people do is associate google only with their consumer facing products. Their cloud business is growing like crazy and they have the best Ai chips for running efficiently/economically at scale (TPUs, vertical integration). There's a reason they run everyone's models better than they can themselves on nvidia cards
> After the probable IPO failures of SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic no one will give them money.<p>People are going to line up for all of them. Hype sells these days.
No one is using DuckDuckGo. Those IPOs are going to go gangbusters, atleast for a while.
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.<p>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.