Why Wall Street Is Happy to Lend Google Billions

Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, Business Insider, and Reuters contributed to this report.

Alphabet quietly kicked off a monster borrowing push this week, and the message from markets was loud and clear: investors still trust Google’s parent to the hilt. The company is lining up a US high-grade dollar bond sale expected to raise roughly $15 billion, and word is it’s spread across as many as seven tranches. Buyers have already piled in – more than $100 billion of orders, according to reports – turning what looks like a routine debt deal into a vote of confidence.

Why the enthusiasm? It’s mostly about one thing: scale. Cloud giants and so-called AI hyperscalers are in a full-on race to bulk up infrastructure. Analysts expect those firms to plow north of $630 billion into data centers, chips and other AI plumbing this year alone. That kind of capex binge needs stable, cheap funding – and Alphabet is in a sweet spot to get it.

The deal itself is structured for flexibility. The offering could include up to seven parts, from short-dated notes to very long maturities. Early chatter on the longest piece – a bond maturing in 2066 – suggested pricing around 1.2 percentage points over Treasuries, a scant premium given the multi-decade payoff. In plain English: investors are willing to wait a long time for modest extra yield to hold a slice of Alphabet paper.

This isn’t Alphabet’s first time leaning on the bond market. Big tech has been borrowing aggressively as capital spending surges. Last year alone the major hyperscalers issued tens of billions in bonds, and deals from the likes of Meta, Microsoft and Oracle proved that the market will fund large, strategic investments – even when the returns are uncertain or slow to appear.

So what does Alphabet want the cash for? The company has flagged huge infrastructure plans tied to AI – more chips, more data centers, more networking – and issuing debt is a way to lock in cheap funding while keeping cash on the balance sheet for strategic moves. For investors, lending to Alphabet looks like a low-risk way to earn a little extra yield from a firm with massive cash flows and market dominance.

But there’s a flipside worth noting. Big borrowing by tech giants feeds a feedback loop: the more you can raise, the more you can spend, and the more entrenched your advantage becomes. That dynamic helps explain why markets treat these names like safe havens – and why regulators and rivals keep an eye on the competitive landscape.

At the end of the day, Alphabet’s latest bond sale is both a financing event and a signal. With orders stacking up well into the triple digits, the market is voting that Alphabet’s long-term AI bet is worth backing – with patient capital and low rate concessions. If the company can turn that spending into real revenue and margin gains, those long-dated notes will look like a bargain. If not, lenders may have to wait a very long time to get paid back. For now, though, investors seem happy to bet on Google’s staying power.