
Do you think you’ll still be using Google in the year 2126? Bond investors are betting that you will. Google’s parent company, Alphabet, is selling a 100-year note as part of a massive debt increase intended to help pay for the company’s massive AI buildout.
According to a report from Bloomberg, in the last 24 hours, Alphabet has been able to save about $32 billion to finance by selling bonds in different currencies—effectively interest-bearing IOUs—including $20 billion in US dollar bonds spread over seven different tranches that come due at different times. Some are due as soon as three years from now, others are pushing 40 years — a long lead time, but shorter than Trump’s proposed 50-year mortgage.
Alphabet’s bond sale has attracted a lot of attention—so the terms appear to be more favorable than Google thought. Per Bloombergthe company planned to raise about $15 billion in USD bonds, but attracted so many orders that it went for another $5 billion on top of that. It gets the premium for moving in its direction, too. On three-year bonds, the return is expected to be about 0.27% higher than US Treasuries—historically one of the safest investments available. Even for 40-year bonds, the premium is 0.95% higher than the expected return from Treasuries, for Euronews. Basically, investors think that investing in Google is as risky as investing in the US government. Honestly, right now, it’s hard to argue with them.
What feels less safe is the issuance of a 100-year bond, which is offered in UK sterling. Compared to Alphabet’s other debt raises, the price of the century note is lower—just £1 billion (or about $1.36 billion USD). However, the company gets better rates on the 100-year bet. According to Bloombergit is priced to sell with interest rates of about 1.2% above the expected return of a 100 year UK government bond. So it seems that the markets believe that Google has little chance of surpassing the British Empire at this point.
Issuing a 100-year bond is rare, basically for all the reasons you can think of. Betting on any company lasting 100 years is a real long shot — especially if they operate in an industry like tech, where they could theoretically become obsolete if they were on the wrong side of a technological advance.
For reference, Bloomberg reported that no tech company has issued a century note in nearly three decades, when Motorola sold the same type of debt in 1997. As Michael Burry, the man from The Great Brief, pointed out on TwitterMotorola went from being one of the top 25 most profitable companies in America at the time of the takeover overtook Nokia’s cell phone sales just one year ago. Now the company well outside the top 300 in market capitalization. The bond, which still won’t reach its maturity date for another 70 years, is currently trading at 80% of its face value, according to TradingView.
So who’s placing their bets on Google not becoming the Motorola of the modern era? Insurance companies and pension funds, generally, according to Bloomberg. So don’t worry, only your retirement account is pushed to the middle of the table for this bet.
Google is far from the only company that plans to spend other people’s money to pay for its planned big investment in infrastructure and building AI. Oracle just closed its own $25 billion debt sale earlier this year, and Reuters reported that the five largest AI hyperscalers—Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Oracle—issued a combined $121 billion in corporate bonds last year. That all goes to pay for building data centers and ramping up AI training. Reuters reported that the same five companies have pledged more than $500 billion in combined capital expenditure this year.
It looks like an economy that crashes amount of money when bets fail. Ready for the banks to put all your money in the black and let it go?






