Alphabet is seeking fresh capital as stock's 4-week losing streak tests investor appetite

Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai during the Bloomberg Tech conference in San Francisco, June 4, 2025. David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images A month ago, Alphabet briefly surpassed Nvidia by market cap. The stock has since been on a downward slide, and is on pace to wrap its fourth straight weekly drop, the longest losing streak in more than a year. That's the market mood Alphabet faces as it pursues $85 billion in fresh capital to help fund its artificial intelligence build-out. While Google has been Wall Street's favorite megacap tech name over the past year, some skepticism is seeping into the story as the cash-rich company seeks even more money for infrastructure and to advance AI models that it hopes will compete with offerings from Anthropic and OpenAI. "I never thought Google would need to hit the public markets to raise money to fund their spending," Dan Niles, founder of Niles Investment Management, said in an interview. Niles said Alphabet has "the best stack in all of AI" at scale, citing its models, tensor processing units, or TPUs, Android distribution, cloud business and search dominance. That strength, he contended, is what makes the equity raise so striking. Like its hyperscaler peers, Google is spending historic sums of cash on new data centers and the chips and systems needed to satisfy soaring demand for AI compute. In April, the company upped its guidance for capital expenditures for the year to as high as $190 billion from $185 billion. …