MW Alphabet's $15 billion bond deal may have a highly unusual component

By Joy Wiltermuth and Emily Bary

As tech companies look to finance their hefty spending plans, they've been offering bonds with longer maturities

Google parent Alphabet is looking to raise up to $15 billion in the bond market on Monday

Alphabet shocked Wall Street last week with its plan to devote between $175 billion and $185 billion to capital expenditures this year, and the Google parent company just gave a signal of how it plans to pay for that.

The cloud and search giant indicated an intention to borrow up to $15 billion in the U.S. bond market on Monday, following on the heels of Oracle's monster $25 billion debt financing a week ago. And Bloomberg News reported that the deal could have a very unusual component: the inclusion of 100-year maturities.

Read: Why Alphabet's stock is falling despite booming cloud growth

Alphabet $(GOOGL)$ has outlined a seven-part U.S. investment-grade corporate-bond deal, which initially could include notes with maturities that range from three years to 40 years, according to Informa Global Markets. That should be thought of as only a starting point, however, since the structure and size of bond deals often changes as demand builds throughout the day.

Alphabet didn't immediately respond to a MarketWatch request for comment.

The prospect of a 100-year tranche would be unconventional because it is difficult to predict the staying power of technology so many decades out. The bond offerings from Oracle $(ORCL)$ and Meta $(META)$ were already viewed as unusual because they both included 40-year tranches, something that tech companies once eschewed.

Shares of Alphabet fell last week after the company unveiled its spending forecast for the year. While Alphabet is viewed as a top artificial-intelligence player due to assets like the rapidly growing Google Cloud business and the increasingly popular Gemini AI model, investors are keenly aware that getting ahead - or staying ahead - comes at a high cost. Alphabet reported $91 billion in capital spending for 2025, meaning that these expenditures could roughly double this year.

The company also has pared back share repurchases while it dedicates ever more money to the purchase of AI hardware.

An Alphabet bond offering would come during a choppy stretch for the AI trade. Not only are investors worried about the spending required to advance the technology, but they're also concerned that new AI tools could upend the business models of traditional software vendors.

Read: Software stocks have been crushed. Here's how to play the sector as the dust settles.

The tumult hasn't been only in stocks, however, with the below chart showing spreads of bonds issued by several major software companies widening by about 14 basis points relative to other segments of the U.S. investment-grade corporate-bond market as a result of AI-related jitters.

Shares of Alphabet were up about 0.6% on Monday, while the iShares Expanded Tech-Software Sector ETF IGV was up about 2.4%.

-Joy Wiltermuth -Emily Bary

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February 09, 2026 11:57 ET (16:57 GMT)

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