Alphabet highlights new AI-related risks in tapping debt market

As Alphabet returns to the debt market to fund its artificial intelligence buildout, the company is acknowledging new risks tied to the rise of AI and its hefty investments in infrastructure.

In its annual financial report late last week, the Google parent highlighted the potential impact of AI on the company’s core advertising business and the possibility of ending up with “excess capacity” from its costly commitments.

“To meet the compute capacity demands of AI training and inference, as well as traditional cloud computing services, we are entering into significant leasing arrangements with third party operators, which may increase costs and operational complexity,” the company stated in the filing with the SEC. Large commercial agreements could also increase “liabilities and obligations in the event of nonperformance by us, our counterparties, or vendors,” Alphabet said.

One of the headline numbers in Alphabet’s earnings report was $185 billion, representing the high end of what the company says it may shell out in capital expenditures this year, more than double its 2025 capex.

To help finance its AI ambitions, Alphabet is planning to raise $20 billion from a U.S. dollar bond sale, according people familiar with the matter who asked not to be named because the details are confidential. The planned sale would take place over four tranches, including a 100-year bond deal in sterling, the people said, with one adding that the deal is five times oversubscribed.

Bloomberg first reported on the planned debt funding, which was originally expected to reach $15 billion.

Alphabet held a $25 billion bond sale in November. Its long-term debt quadrupled in 2025 to $46.5 billion. CFO Anat Ashkenazi said on last week’s earnings call that as the company considers its total investment, “we want to make sure we do it in a fiscally responsible way, and that we invest appropriately, but we do it in a way that maintains a very healthy financial position for the organization.”

When asked on the call what keeps executives up at night, CEO Sundar Pichai responded “compute capacity,” adding, “power, land, supply chain constraints, how do you ramp up to meet this extraordinary demand for this moment?”   

In total, Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon are now projected to increase capex this year by more than 60% from the historic levels reached in 2025, as they load up on high-priced chips, build new facilities and buy the networking technology to connect it all.

At the center of Google’s AI strategy is Gemini, its large language model and AI assistant that’s going head-to-head with OpenAI’s offerings and Anthropic’s Claude.

Pichai said on the earnings call that the Gemini AI app now has more than 750 million monthly active users, up from 650 million monthly active users last quarter.

With more consumers adopting generative AI, Google has to face the potential of people decreasing their use of internet search, which means possible changes in the company’s dominant ad business. It’s another thing that Google included in the risk sections of its financial filing for the first time.

“We and our competitors are constantly adjusting to meet this shift and provide new and evolving advertising formats,” the filing says. “There is no assurance that we will adapt effectively and competitively to meet this shift, and that such advertising formats, strategies, and offerings will be successful.”  

Thus far, Google has been able to fend off concerns that AI will cannibalize its search and ads business. Ad revenue in the fourth quarter increased 13.5% from a year earlier to $82.28 billion.

— CNBC’s Seema Mody contributed to this report.

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