

Why does Google need to borrow money for 100 years?
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Alphabet just did something that, on the surface, sounds absolutely insane. The company behind Google sold bonds that won't mature until the year 2126.
That's right, a full century from now. When your great-great-grandchildren might be reading history books about how quaint smartphones were. And here's the kicker: investors went crazy for it.
Alphabet wanted to raise £1 billion with this century bond and received £9.5 billion in bids. That's nearly 10 times oversubscribed. The overall debt raised across dollars, sterling, and Swiss francs hit almost $32 billion in less than 24 hours.
This is unprecedented in modern tech. The last time a technology company issued a 100-year bond was in 1997, when Motorola did it, right in the middle of the dot-com bubble. Most of us know how that story ended.
But here's what makes this moment different and fascinating: Alphabet has only existed for about 28 years. Google started in a garage in Menlo Park, California, with desktop computers and a $100,000 investment from an angel investor. Now they're asking bondholders to trust them for longer than many nations have existed in their current form.
To understand why Alphabet is doing this, you need to understand the sheer scale of money being thrown at artificial intelligence right now. Alphabet announced it plans to spend up to $185 billion in capital expenditures in 2026 alone. Read that number again.
That's more than double the $75 billion they spent in 2025. Their long-term debt quadrupled to $46.5 billion in 2025. They held a $25 billion bond sale just in November.
Read on livemint.com