Alphabet plans to raise $80 billion for AI infrastructure

Published: 2026-06-03T09:18:00.000Z

The race to build AI keeps getting more expensive, and Alphabet just showed how far it will reach. Google's parent said it plans to raise $80 billion in equity to fund its AI infrastructure, with Berkshire Hathaway putting in $10 billion through a private placement.

The race to build artificial intelligence keeps getting more expensive, and Alphabet just showed how far it is willing to reach to keep pace. Google's parent company said on monday that it plans to raise $80 billion in equity to bankroll its AI infrastructure, one of the largest single funding moves any technology company has made for this purpose. The headline grabber was Berkshire Hathaway, which agreed to put in $10 billion through a private placement, lending Warren Buffett's stamp of approval to a company once seen as outside his usual comfort zone. The structure of the raise is worth unpacking. Alongside the Berkshire piece, Alphabet is selling about $30 billion through underwritten public offerings, split between mandatory convertible preferred stock and a mix of its Class A and Class C shares, with another $40 billion coming from an at the market program that lets it sell stock gradually starting in the third quarter. Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley are steering the underwritten portion. The company described the use of the money plainly, framing it as general corporate purposes that center on scaling AI infrastructure and global compute. The reason for all this is demand the company says it cannot currently meet. Alphabet has been clear that interest in its AI products from both businesses and everyday users is running ahead of the computing power it has available, which is an unusual problem to admit publicly. The numbers behind that pressure are striking, with Google Cloud revenue up 63 percent year over year in the first quarter and its order backlog nearly doubling to more than $460 billion in a single quarter. The company now expects capital spending of $180 billion to $190 billion this year, with more to come in 2027. What makes the equity raise notable is that Alphabet is hardly short of cash. It generated around $174 billion in operating cash flow over the past year, yet it has still leaned heavily on outside financing, issuing tens of billions in bonds across recent months. The decision to tap equity on top of that signals just how enormous the bill for staying competitive in AI has become, with industry wide spending on compute and data centers projected to reach trillions by the end of the decade. For the Middle East, this buildout is not a distant story. The Gulf has positioned itself as a hub for exactly the kind of compute Alphabet is chasing, with Saudi Arabia and the UAE pouring sovereign money into data centers and courting hyperscalers to set up regional cloud capacity. Google already operates cloud regions in the area, and as the global hunt for power and computing space intensifies, energy rich states see an opening to host a slice of the infrastructure underpinning the AI economy.