Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOGL), Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN), Meta (NASDAQ: META), and Oracle (NYSE: ORCL) have issued roughly $194 billion in bonds this year, nearly twice their combined total for all of 2025.
Alphabet’s latest bond sale could add as much as $25 billion more, pushing its total debt issuance for the year to nearly $77 billion.
The 10-part sale stretches from two-year notes all the way to bonds maturing in 2066, reflecting the long-horizon nature of AI infrastructure investment.
Alphabet received approximately $115 billion in orders on the deal, more than four times the potential deal size, with demand surpassing recent AI bond offerings from Amazon and SpaceX.
Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) has not issued a comparable public bond deal this year and was excluded from comparisons tracking the group’s combined issuance totals.
Alphabet’s core businesses generated nearly $40 billion in cash during the second quarter, but the company spent almost $45 billion on data centers, servers, and other long-term equipment.
That spending gap pushed Alphabet’s free cash flow below zero for the first time, a milestone that contributed to the stock’s worst single-day performance in more than a year.
The stock then fell an additional 4% on Wednesday following several key AI leadership departures, though Alphabet remains up roughly 16% for the year overall.
During the first six months of 2026, Alphabet issued $51.8 billion in bonds and raised $49.6 billion by selling stock, with another $40 billion stock-sale program still available at the end of June.
That approach marks a sharp reversal from the prior year, when Alphabet spent $28.3 billion buying back stock in the first half of 2025, buying back none during the same period this year.
The shift away from buybacks signals how aggressively Big Tech is redirecting capital toward AI infrastructure at the expense of traditional shareholder return programs.
Borrowing allows companies like Alphabet to preserve cash reserves and continue building out infrastructure while spreading repayment costs across many years.
However, the cost of that borrowing is rising, with the 30-year Treasury yield moving back above 5.2%, lifting the baseline for long-term corporate debt.
Alphabet also offered investors relatively generous yields to attract sufficient demand for the offering, according to Bloomberg, adding to the overall cost of the financing.
The strong order book confirms that investors remain willing to fund the AI build-out, but shareholders will be watching closely to see whether the investments generate enough cash to eventually revive buybacks and reduce further debt reliance.
