Alphabet’s record-breaking $85B raise for Google’s AI business is a helluva good signal

If Alphabet’s record-breaking $85 billion stock sale signals investor appetite for AI-related offerings — and it does — we can safely say that investors are voracious.

Google’s parent company had initially intended to sell a first tranche of $40 billion worth of various equity instruments — two different classes of shares, plus smaller “depositary shares” priced to be accessible to a broader range of investors. But the offering was so oversubscribed that it raised $45 billion instead, CEO Sundar Pichai said in a post on X on Monday. Among the buyers: Berkshire Hathaway, still known for its love of value investing, picked up $10 billion worth.

Alphabet plans to sell another $40 billion worth next quarter, for $85 billion total.

Even $80 billion would have topped the record for equity offerings previously set by Brazilian oil producer Petroleo Brasileiro SA, which raised $70 billion in 2010, Bloomberg reports.

Now, it’s true that these investors are buying shares of Alphabet, not shares in a younger, possibly debt-riddled AI startup. Alphabet is a very healthy business: $110 billion in revenue (with high profit margins) in Q1 alone, up 22% year-over-year.

Still, the money from this stock sale is earmarked for AI. “Part of our multi-year investment strategy to meet the AI opportunity ahead and support the demand we’re seeing from enterprises and consumers,” as Pichai described it. At Google I/O last month, he said the company expects to spend between $180 billion and $190 billion on capital expenditures — largely on AI infrastructure and data centers — before the year is out.

The timing matters beyond Alphabet itself. As Anthropic gets ready to go public, this enormously successful stock sale is a very good sign for the broader AI IPO pipeline. It indicates that public investors, particularly the deep-pocketed institutional ones, are ready to pony up.

The upcoming SpaceX IPO is expected to smash records for cash raised and valuation, and Anthropic’s deal is expected to do the same, possibly surpassing SpaceX. OpenAI is also waiting in the wings.

But all of this rests on public investors’ appetite — not just private VCs — remaining strong, and then staying that way. An unprecedented nearly $8 trillion in AI spending has been committed over the next five years. That money has to come from somewhere — and that somewhere includes individual company revenues, loans, and capital raised through stock sales. Whether public markets have the stomach to absorb that much, for that long, is the question that every AI company eyeing an IPO should be thinking about right now.