Alphabet to Raise $80 Billion for Its AI Buildout — With a $10 Billion Vote of Confidence From Buffett’s Berkshire

Alphabet, Google’s parent company and one of the most cash-rich businesses on earth, said on June 1 that it plans to raise about $80 billion by selling stock — an unusual move for a company that generates tens of billions in free cash flow each quarter. The reason is singular: paying for an artificial-intelligence buildout whose cost has outrun even Alphabet’s formidable balance sheet.

The raise comes in three parts. Alphabet plans roughly $30 billion in concurrent underwritten public offerings and a $40 billion at-the-market program covering its Class A and Class C shares, which it expects to begin in the third quarter of 2026. The final piece is a $10 billion private placement to Berkshire Hathaway — split evenly between $5 billion of Class A stock at $351.81 a share and $5 billion of Class C stock at $348.20 — that adds to a position Warren Buffett’s conglomerate has been quietly building since late 2025.

Alphabet was blunt about why it needs the money. The company said it is "experiencing strong demand for its AI solutions and services from enterprises and consumers, at levels that are exceeding the company’s available supply," and framed the equity sale as a way to "fund its investments in a balanced way while retaining a healthy balance sheet." In other words: demand for Gemini, Google Cloud and AI-powered search is outstripping the data centers, chips and power Alphabet can currently bring online.

The numbers behind that supply crunch are staggering. CEO Sundar Pichai has signaled that Alphabet expects to spend between $180 billion and $190 billion on capital expenditures in 2026 alone. Across the industry, the largest technology companies are on track to pour roughly $700 billion into AI infrastructure this year — a capital cycle with few precedents in corporate history, and one that is increasingly being financed with outside money rather than internal cash.

The Berkshire stake is the headline twist. Buffett’s firm has historically been wary of richly valued technology, and a $10 billion vote of confidence in an AI-infrastructure raise reads as a signal that the buildout is being underwritten by some of the most conservative capital in the market — not just by venture funds and momentum investors. It also lands in the same week that Anthropic filed confidentially for an IPO and as SpaceX and OpenAI queue up their own listings, underscoring how much capital the AI era is pulling toward a handful of players.