Alphabet said Monday it will sell $80 billion of stock to fund its artificial-intelligence buildout, including a $10 billion private placement with Berkshire Hathaway that ranks as the largest technology investment under Chief Executive Greg Abel since he succeeded Warren Buffett.
The offering is the largest equity raise by a megacap technology company in the current AI cycle and pushes Alphabet's funding mix beyond the bond market, where it has already issued more than $66 billion of debt since November. Proceeds will pay for the data centers, power and chips that Chief Executive Sundar Pichai has identified as the binding constraint on growth at the Google parent, which raised its 2026 capital-expenditure target in April to between $180 billion and $190 billion.
Deal structure
Alphabet agreed to sell $5 billion of Class A shares to Berkshire at $351.81 apiece and another $5 billion of Class C stock at $348.20 per share, CNBC reported. A further $30 billion will come through underwritten public offerings, including $15 billion in what Alphabet described as "depositary shares representing mandatory convertible preferred stock." The remaining $40 billion will be sold through an at-the-market program covering Class A and Class C shares, expected to begin in the third quarter.
Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley are joint book-running managers on the underwritten offerings, and Goldman is the placement agent for the Berkshire purchase. Alphabet's shares, which have more than doubled in the past year, slipped in extended trading after the announcement.
What the money buys
Alphabet said in a statement that the capital will "fund investments in its world-class AI compute infrastructure to meet its unprecedented customer demand." The company added that demand for its AI products is running at "levels that are exceeding the company's available supply," outstripping what Alphabet can currently deliver.
Pichai sketched the bottleneck on the company's most recent earnings call. Asked what keeps Google executives up at night, he answered "compute capacity" and added: "Be it power, land, supply chain constraints, how do you ramp up to meet this extraordinary demand for this moment?"
Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon are on course to spend more than $700 billion combined on capital projects this year, most of it tied to AI, and Wall Street analysts expect the four to push that figure above $1 trillion in 2027. Alphabet's February global bond issuance topped $30 billion, followed by roughly $11 billion raised in Europe in sterling and Swiss francs, on top of a $25 billion sale in November.
Abel's tech bet
The purchase doubles down on a position Berkshire first disclosed in the third quarter of 2025, when it bought about 17.8 million Alphabet shares. The conglomerate has added to the stake for two consecutive quarters, and before Monday's announcement the holding was worth roughly $20 billion, one of its largest equity positions behind Apple.
Abel inherited a nearly $400 billion cash pile when he took over from Buffett, and Monday's commitment is among the clearest signals to date that he will deploy it into technology. Buffett long described Berkshire's Apple stake as a consumer bet; the Alphabet investment ties Berkshire directly to the AI buildout. The deal followed by one day Berkshire's $6.8 billion agreement to acquire homebuilder Taylor Morrison Home for cash.
Missing voices
No dissent or short-seller voice appeared in Monday's reporting on the offering, and neither Alphabet nor Berkshire fielded named critics in the wire coverage. The most concrete reservation surfaced in the stock itself, which slipped in extended trading after the announcement, a typical reaction to dilutive equity raises. Today's reporting offered no perspective from investors questioning whether Alphabet's spending will earn its cost of capital.
The at-the-market program is scheduled to begin in the third quarter, giving public investors the next dated read on how readily the market will absorb a drip of new Alphabet shares on top of Monday's underwritten and private sales.