Alphabet enters yen bond market to fund soaring AI spending

Alphabet is entering Japan’s debt market for the first time with a yen-denominated bond sale that could raise several hundred billion yen, a sign that the cost of building artificial intelligence infrastructure is pushing even the richest tech companies to borrow more widely.

The Google parent is planning a multi-tranche offering that could stretch across maturities of three, five, seven, 10, 15, 20, 30 and 40 years, depending on demand and market conditions. The deal is expected to be a senior unsecured bond, and Alphabet has hired Mizuho, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley to manage the transaction.

The financing push comes as Alphabet’s capital spending keeps climbing. On its April 29 earnings call, the company raised its full-year 2026 capital-expenditure guidance to $180 billion to $190 billion, up from $175 billion to $185 billion, and said the updated outlook now includes investment tied to the Intersect acquisition, which closed in March. Alphabet reported $35.7 billion in capital expenditures in the first quarter, including real estate, servers, data centers and other infrastructure.

Chief financial officer Anat Ashkenazi said 2027 capex is expected to “significantly increase” compared with 2026, while chief executive Sundar Pichai said the company remains “compute constrained” in the near term. Those comments underscored why Alphabet is still adding funding capacity even with a balance sheet that ranks among the strongest in corporate America.

Alphabet has already turned to multiple currency markets to support its expansion, including euros, sterling, Canadian dollars and Swiss francs. Earlier in May, the company had raised about $32 billion through previous bond sales, and another euro deal followed only days before the yen plan. The yen debut extends that global borrowing strategy and broadens Alphabet’s investor base beyond the United States.

The move lands in a broader wave of overseas tech borrowing tied to artificial intelligence. Demand for yen debt from foreign issuers has remained resilient even as Japanese interest rates rise, giving global companies another venue to finance data centers, servers and networking equipment. Amazon is also preparing a Swiss-franc bond issue, another sign that the AI race is increasingly being funded in the debt markets as much as in cash flow.

For Alphabet, the message is clear: the AI buildout is no longer just a matter of chips and models. It is a long-duration capital project, and the financing burden is spreading across currencies, maturities and continents.