Alphabet just made one of the boldest bets in corporate finance history, issuing a 100-year sterling bond to bankroll its ballooning AI infrastructure spending. The move signals how deep the AI arms race has become - and how willing Big Tech is to leverage its balance sheet decades into the future. As Google's parent company diversifies its lender base with this ultra-long debt instrument, the financing strategy is raising fresh concerns about whether AI capex has crossed from ambitious into dangerous territory.
Alphabet is betting on AI returns a century out. The tech giant just tapped debt markets with a 100-year sterling bond - a financial instrument so rare it's nicknamed a "century bond" - to fund the massive capital expenditures required to stay competitive in the AI infrastructure race. The move marks a turning point in how Big Tech finances its AI ambitions, and it's making credit analysts nervous.
The ultra-long bond offering diversifies Google's lender base at a time when the company is ramping capex spending to historic levels. While Alphabet hasn't disclosed the exact size of the offering, century bonds typically attract pension funds and insurance companies looking for ultra-long duration assets. For Alphabet, it's a way to lock in financing costs now while pushing repayment obligations so far into the future that today's executives won't be around to see them come due.
But here's what's really happening - this is a financing arms race disguised as an AI arms race. Microsoft has already committed to spending upward of $80 billion on AI infrastructure in 2026 alone, while Meta and Amazon are each pouring tens of billions into data centers, custom chips, and GPU clusters. Alphabet's century bond is essentially a financial nuclear option, a signal that the company will use every tool available to avoid falling behind in the compute wars.
