Google CEO Sundar Pichai sends a ‘thanks note’ to Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway; says: On Monday we announced…
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai has publicly thanked investors after Google parent’s massive equity offering was oversubscribed, with Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway leading the headline names with a $10 billion check. In a post shared after markets closed, Pichai confirmed Alphabet raised roughly $45 billion in the first leg of the offering, with another $40 billion expected through an “at the market” program starting in Q3—taking the total to around $85 billion. “A huge thank you to our investors, including Berkshire Hathaway who invested $10B,” he wrote.The money has one job. It is going straight into Alphabet’s AI compute build-out, the same capacity crunch that Pichai recently described as the thing keeping Google executives up at night. The company has already revised its 2026 capital expenditure forecast to between $180 billion and $190 billion, up from an earlier $175 billion to $185 billion range.
Berkshire Hathaway’s $10 billion bet on Google’s AI future
Berkshire’s commitment came through a private placement, split into $5 billion of Class A common stock at $351.81 per share and $5 billion of Class C capital stock at $348.20 per share—both priced below Monday’s close. It is the single largest line item in the raise. And it adds to a position Berkshire has been quietly stacking since the third quarter of last year, with the conglomerate tripling its Alphabet stake last month to roughly $16.6 billion.For Buffett’s successor Greg Abel, the message is clear enough: Alphabet’s AI spending is expected to earn its keep, even with the company issuing fresh shares that dilute existing holders.
How Alphabet plans to deploy the $85 billion AI war chest
Beyond the Berkshire placement, Alphabet is raising $30 billion through underwritten public offerings, split evenly between depositary shares tied to mandatory convertible preferred stock and Class A and C shares. The remaining $40 billion will arrive via an at-the-market program starting in Q3, giving the company room to sell shares gradually instead of in one heavy block. Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, and Morgan Stanley are running the books.The equity raise sits on top of an already large debt pile. Alphabet has raised more than $85 billion in debt across six currencies in the past year, pushing total debt past $100 billion. Stack that against the new $85 billion in equity, and Google’s AI fund is starting to look less like corporate capex and more like a small country’s budget.Context matters here. Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon are collectively expected to spend more than $700 billion on capex this year, with Wall Street estimating total AI capex could cross $1 trillion in 2027. Alphabet stock has more than doubled in the past year, outpacing every megacap peer.
