Google Plans First Yen Bonds, Gathers Six Major Currencies Financing within Months

According to Bloomberg, Google's parent company Alphabet is planning to issue yen-denominated bonds for the first time, further expanding its global financing footprint into the Asian market.

Sources disclosed that Alphabet has hired BofA Securities, Mizuho Securities, and Morgan Stanley to manage the issuance, with the bonds being fixed-rate, senior unsecured bonds, and the transaction will be conducted as an SEC-registered offering, expected to move forward in the near future based on market conditions.

This marks Alphabet's historic entry into the yen bond market. If successful, it would mean that within just three months, the company will have achieved comprehensive coverage across the major currencies' bond markets, including dollars, pounds, Swiss francs, euros, Canadian dollars, and yen, an unprecedented financing pace in the technology industry.

Last week, Alphabet just completed the largest-ever euro bond offering, priced at €9 billion and attracting more than €18.3 billion in subscription orders. At the same time, the company also made its debut in the Canadian dollar debt market with an offering of CAD 8.5 billion, setting a record for Canadian investment-grade corporate debt. Together, the two transactions raised about $17 billion.

In February, Alphabet completed approximately $32 billion in multi-currency financing in less than 24 hours, covering the United States dollar, pound, and Swiss franc. The most eye-catching part was a £1 billion, 100-year pound bond, which received nearly ten times oversubscription, marking the tech industry's first issuance of a century bond in nearly 30 years, with the last one dating back to Motorola in 1997.

The core driver of this round of intensive financing is Alphabet's continuously rising AI capital expenditures. In the financial report for the first quarter of this year, the company raised its full-year capital expenditure guidance for 2026 to $180 billion to $190 billion, higher than the previous estimate of $175 billion to $185 billion. CFO Anat Ashkenazi also stated that capital expenditures are expected to "grow significantly" on this basis in 2027.

Alphabet's full-year capital expenditures in 2025 were $91.4 billion, and in 2024, only $52.5 billion. This means that the upper limit for expenditures in 2026 will be nearly quadruple that of two years prior, mainly directed towards AI-related servers, custom chips, and data center construction.

Alphabet is not the only tech giant making significant investments. According to Fortune, Microsoft's full-year capital expenditure guidance for 2026 is also $190 billion, while Meta has raised its budget range to $125 billion to $145 billion. Multiple institutions estimate that the major technology companies' AI-related capital expenditures in 2026 will surpass $600 billion.

Against this backdrop, with a credit rating of S&P AA+, Alphabet is actively taking advantage of the global bond market's window for diversified financing. Multi-currency issuance not only helps to reduce the financing costs and exchange rate risks in a single market but also builds a more resilient funding source for the continuous expansion of capital expenditures.

For investors, the core question to watch is whether this round of massive capital expenditures can be converted into actual revenue growth. First-quarter data shows that Google's cloud business revenue has broken $20 billion, with a year-over-year growth of 63%, and the backlog of cloud business orders has doubled year-over-year to $240 billion, which to some extent alleviates market concerns about "overinvestment and insufficient returns." However, as expenditures are expected to continue to rise in 2027, the sustainability of investment returns will continue to be a focus for the market to follow.

The specific issuance size and pricing of the yen bonds have not yet been announced, and further attention is needed regarding the final terms of the transaction and market subscription status.