This is is one of the biggest ever sales of new shares and includes a $10 billion share sale to the investment mammoth formerly led by Warren Buffett as Anthropic files to float
Google’s parent company Alphabet plans to raise up to $80 billion in equity, in part to fund its AI infrastructure investments. This is one of the biggest ever sales of new shares and includes a $10 billion share sale to the investment mammoth Berkshire Hathaway, which was co-run by legendary investor Warren Buffett from 1962 to 2025.
Alphabet creared the Gemini AI system and says it will use the money to expand its “world-class AI compute infrastructure to meet its unprecedented customer demand”. More specifically, in its filing, Alphabet says half the $80 billion will be dedicated to “scale AI infrastructure and global compute”.
The other half will cover the cost of “an administrative change to how [Alphabet] meets tax obligations associated with vesting of employee equity awards”.
Alphabet’s AI solutions and services are used by both enterprises and consumers, at levels that are pushing the company’s ability to meet them. Hence the company is seeking to scale its investments by expanding its foundational infrastructure.
Meaningful returns?
The Guardian newspaper writes, “such a huge fundraising is also a warning to the markets that, for all the many billions of dollars thrown at AI infrastructure, meaningful returns are limited”.
Berkshire Hathaway was known for providing funding at key moments, most notably the $5 billion it pumped into Goldman Sachs during the 2008 financial crisis. The timing is interesting here too: Alphabet is turning to investors ahead of flotations by ‘rival’ AI firms on the stock markets.
Indeed, yesterday Anthropic, famous for its Claude GenAI model, said it had filed for an initial public offering on the US stock market. ‘Rival’ needs some qualification due to the habit of investors funding multiple AI firms, including those they compete against.
In April, Alphabet said it would invest up to $40 billion in Anthropic, immediately committing $10 billion in cash “at a valuation of $350 billion” to help Anthropic majorly expand its computing capacity. The other $30 will be forthcoming if Claude meets performance targets.
Anthropic is valued at around $965 billion after raising $65 billion total funding so far, thereby overtaking OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT, which itself is expected to issue an initial public offering late this year: at the recent court case between Elon Musk and OpenAI case, Microsoft executive Michael Wetter said his company has spent more than $100 billion on partnering OpenAI including direct investments, Azure infrastructure and hosting costs for AI models.
Last November, Microsoft committed to invest up to $5 billion in Anthropic, with Anthropic committing to buy large-scale compute capacity from Microsoft Azure in reciprocation. Amazon also said it will invest up to £25 billion because, according to Reuters, the AI firm stands out by focusing its model training on coding.
Enterprise or consumer appeal?
Nate Elliot, AI analyst at Emarketer, comments, “We’re about to find out whether the market thinks AI is a consumer story or an enterprise story. Because while Claude has built a solid enterprise user base, it’s just not competitive as a consumer AI platform.” In January, Microsoft said it would spend about $500M annually on Claude as the default option for most of its business customers.
“Emarketer forecasts that only 5.4% of US internet users will use Claude in 2026, far behind the 36.6% who will use ChatGPT and the 27.4% who will use [Google’s] Gemini. The good news for Anthropic: more than 60% of US AI users say they use these tools for work, and we believe that percentage will only grow,” adds Elliot.
