Alphabet Inc. Class C (GOOGL.US) expands its largest-ever equity financing to $84.75 billion and enters the municipal bond prepayment energy market for the first time.

To support its ongoing expansion of artificial intelligence strategy, Alphabet Inc. Class C's parent company Alphabet (GOOG.US, GOOGL.US) has further expanded its financing plan announced earlier this week to $84.75 billion, up from the previously announced $80 billion. This not only sets a new record for global equity financing, but also highlights the escalating capital competition among tech giants around AI infrastructure. According to the latest disclosed financing plan, Alphabet's financing this time includes three major parts: the company plans to launch a $40 billion "at-the-market (ATM) issuance program" starting in the third quarter, selling shares in batches based on market conditions; $18 billion in A-class common stock and C-class capital stock issuance, as well as $16.75 billion in depositary stock issuance; Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A.US, BRK.B.US) will also invest $10 billion in Alphabet through private transactions. The $84.75 billion financing scale has become the largest equity financing transaction in global capital market history. The previous record was set by Brazilian oil giant Petroleo Brasileiro SA Sponsored ADR Pfd (PBR.US) in 2010, when its total equity and preferred stock financing amounted to approximately $70 billion. It is widely believed in the market that such a large-scale financing is extremely rare for a tech company with a huge market value like Alphabet, and it adds a significant event to this year's already hot IPO and financing market. Alphabet stated that the proceeds from the financing will mainly be used to support the company's increasing AI capital expenditure needs. In recent years, with the rapid proliferation of generative AI, Alphabet Inc. Class C is aggressively building AI data centers, expanding cloud infrastructure, and accelerating the promotion of its self-developed TPU chips. TPU has become one of the most important AI computing solutions outside of NVIDIA Corporation's (NVDA.US) GPU. As the computing power required for training and running large AI models continues to soar, large tech companies, including Alphabet, Microsoft Corporation, Meta, and Amazon.com, Inc., have all reached historically high levels of capital expenditure. Affected by the news of expanded financing, Alphabet's stock price rose by about 0.7% in Wednesday's trading session. In addition to record-breaking financing, Alphabet has entered the U.S. municipal bond prepaid energy market for the first time. According to preliminary bond documents released on Tuesday evening, Alphabet will participate as the funding recipient in a $1 billion bond transaction issued by the California Community Choice Financing Authority. The project will provide long-term discounted power supply to the California-based electricity supplier Pioneer Community Energy. This is the first time a U.S. tech company has been publicly disclosed to participate in such prepaid energy financing transactions. The prepaid energy financing model typically allows funding recipients to finance at tax-exempt bond rates and then invest the funds in higher-yielding taxable assets to gain spread income. At the same time, utility companies can lock in lower-cost long-term energy supply. In the past, this market was mainly dominated by large banks, but in recent years, insurance companies and other financial institutions have also begun to participate. Alphabet's entry into this field is viewed by the market as a significant signal of its exploration of more low-cost financing channels.