Even Alphabet doesn’t have enough money to meet its AI goals.
One of the most important factors in the arms race for AI dominance is the amount of investment companies are making in areas such as data centers and computing power. Anthropic, which just went public, announced last week that it had raised $65 billion in its latest funding round. OpenAI has incurred over $1 trillion in spending. And now Alphabet – Google’s parent company and one of the three most valuable companies in the world (depending on the whims of the stock market) – is looking for more money to fuel its AI ambitions.
Alphabet said in a press release that it was selling $80 billion in stock “to fund investments in its world-class AI computing infrastructure to meet unprecedented customer demand.” Holding company Berkshire Hathaway, which already had a stake worth about $20 billion, is buying it for $10 billion.
“Alphabet intends to use the net proceeds from the concurrent underwritten public offerings and concurrent private placement for general corporate purposes, including capital expenditures to scale AI infrastructure and global computing,” the company said.
In its latest earnings conference call, Alphabet said it expects its capital spending for this year to be between $180 billion and $190 billion. It suggests that this figure is likely to “increase significantly” in 2027. The company generated $110 billion in the first three months of 2026, an increase of 22% compared to the same period in 2025.
On a completely unrelated note, I just discovered an interesting website that offers estimates on what companies like Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic spend on AI compared to the revenue they generate from that spending. The site, called Is AI Profitable Yet?, suggests that none of them are close to turning a profit on their AI spending, while NVIDIA is raking in money.
