Alphabet looks to raise about $15 billion from US bond sale, Bloomberg News reports

Feb 9 (Reuters) – Alphabet is looking to raise about $15 billion from a U.S. high-grade dollar bond sale, Bloomberg News reported on Monday, citing people with knowledge of the matter.

Technology firms are turning to debt sales worth tens of billions of dollars to fund infrastructure expansions as demand for artificial intelligence workloads surges.

Cloud-computing companies known as hyperscalers are expected to pour more than $630 billion combined, largely into AI this year, even though returns have lagged the pace of growth in the outlays.

Alphabet did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment. Reuters could not independently verify the report.

The Google parent is selling bonds in as many as seven parts, according to its regulatory filing, which did not disclose the size of the sale.

Initial price discussions for the longest portion of the deal – a bond maturing in 2066 – are for a premium of about 1.2 percentage point above Treasuries, the Bloomberg report said.

Pent-up M&A and companies’ efforts to refinance existing debt are expected to lift overall corporate bond issuance this year, but the biggest driver will be borrowing to fund AI-related investments, according to a Barclays report.

The five major AI hyperscalers – Amazon, Alphabet’s Google, Meta Microsoft and Oracle – issued $121 billion in U.S. corporate bonds last year, compared with an average $28 billion per year between 2020 and 2024, according to a January 9 report by BofA Securities.

Oracle sought $18 billion in new debt in September, while Meta raised $30 billion in October, the largest-ever individual non-M&A high-grade bond sale.

(Reporting by Jaspreet Singh in Bengaluru; Editing by Arun Koyyur)