Not even Alphabet has enough cash to meet its AI goals.
One of the biggest factors in the arms race for AI dominance is just how much capital companies are spending on the likes of data centers and compute power. Anthropic, which just filed to go public, last week said it had raised $65 billion in its latest funding round. OpenAI has made over a trillion dollars in spending commitments. And now Alphabet — Google’s parent and one of the world’s three most valuable companies (according to the whims of the stock market) — is looking for more money to fuel its AI ambitions.
Alphabet said in a press release that it’s selling $80 billion of stock “to fund investments in its world-class AI compute infrastructure to meet its unprecedented customer demand.” Holding company Berkshire Hathaway, which already had a stake that was worth around $20 billion, is buying $10 billion of that stock.
“Alphabet intends to use the net proceeds from the concurrent underwritten public offerings and the concurrent private placement for general corporate purposes, including capital expenditures to scale AI infrastructure and global compute,” the company said.
During its most recent earnings call, Alphabet said it expected its capital expenditures for this year to be between $180-$190 billion. It suggested that figure is likely to “significantly increase” in 2027. The company generated $110 billion in the first three months of 2026, a 22 percent increase from the same period in 2025.
On an entirely unrelated note, I just learned about an interesting website that offers estimates on what the likes of Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic are spending on AI versus the revenue they generate from said outlay. The site, dubbed Is AI Profitable Yet?, suggests that, other none of those are anywhere close to generating a profit on their AI expenditure, while NVIDIA is raking in the cash.
