Google Lines Up 100-Year Sterling Bond Sale
4 44Alphabet has lined up banks to sell a rare 100-year bond, stepping up a borrowing spree by Big Tech companies racing to fund their vast investments in AI this year. From a report: The so-called century bond will form part of a debut sterling issuance this week by Google's parent company, according to people familiar with the matter. Alphabet was also selling $15bn of dollar bonds on Monday and lining up a Swiss franc bond sale, the people said.
Century bonds -- long-term borrowing at its most extreme -- are highly unusual, although a flurry were sold during the period of very low interest rates that followed the financial crisis, including by governments such as Austria and Argentina. The University of Oxford, EDF and the Wellcome Trust -- the most recent in 2018 -- are the only issuers to have previously tapped the sterling century market.
Such sales are even rarer in the tech sector, with most of the industry's biggest groups issuing up to 40 years, although IBM sold a 100-year bond back in 1996. Big Tech companies and their suppliers are expected to invest almost $700bn in AI infrastructure this year and are increasingly turning to the debt markets to finance the giant data centre build-out. Michael Burry, writing on Substack: Alphabet looking to issue a 100-year bond. Last time this happened in tech was Motorola in 1997, which was the last year Motorola was considered a big deal.
At the start of 1997, Motorola was a top 25 market cap and top 25 revenue corporation in America. Never again. The Motorola corporate brand in 1997 was ranked #1 in the US, ahead of Microsoft. In 1998, Nokia overtook Motorola in cell phones, and after the iPhone it fell out of the consumer eye. Today Motorola is the 232nd largest market cap with only $11 billion in sales.
4 comments
Here goes the bubble (Score: 5, Insightful)
by whitroth ( 9367 ) on <whitroth@NoSPAm.5-cent.us> on Monday February 09, 2026 @12:14PM (#65977934)
They're desperate for loans that they won't have to pay back.
Re: The Alphabet Guarantee (Score: 5, Interesting)
by reanjr ( 588767 ) on Monday February 09, 2026 @01:06PM (#65978058)
Bonds have priority in liquidation. It doesn't matter if Google is still here. The first people to get paid if things go south are the bond holders, not the stock holders.
Re: The Alphabet Guarantee (Score: 5, Funny)
by Waffle Iron ( 339739 ) on Monday February 09, 2026 @01:24PM (#65978110)
At liquidation, each bond holder will receive one obsolete Nvidia GPU for every $1,000 in bond face value.
Good luck for the grandkids (Score: 5, Interesting)
by nospam007 ( 722110 ) * ) on Monday February 09, 2026 @12:44PM (#65978004)
Several US “100-year” style bonds did go bust, usually because the issuer collapsed long before the century was up.
The pattern is boringly consistent: railroads, municipalities, and a few grand infrastructure dreams that assumed the future would politely cooperate.
The classic failures were railroad bonds in the late 19th and early 20th century.
Railroads loved ultra-long maturities because they matched the lifespan of tracks and bridges.
Investors loved them because “America is growing forever”.
Many of those companies did not.
When railroads went bankrupt, bondholders were wiped out or forced into deep restructurings decades before maturity.
The bonds did not reach year 100, they died with the issuer.
Municipal century bonds also failed. Cities like Detroit issued very long-dated bonds in the early 1900s. Detroit’s 2013 bankruptcy showed the flaw in the idea that cities are immortal.
Holders of long-dated Detroit paper took severe haircuts.
Again, the bonds existed on paper, but the promise of 100 years was fiction.
Public utility bonds failed too.
Electric, gas, and water companies issued ultra-long bonds assuming stable monopolies.
When regulation changed, companies collapsed or were reorganised, and the bonds defaulted or were converted at a loss.
The lesson history teaches very clearly is that a 100-year bond is not about maturity, it is a bet on institutional survival.
In the US, corporations and cities routinely die before a century passes.
Governments with monetary sovereignty USUALLY don’t but there ARE exceptions.
Imperial Russia, bonds repudiated after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, investors got nothing despite full monetary sovereignty before collapse.
Germany, Weimar-era hyperinflation destroyed bond value after WWI, later Reich debt was restructured or written down after WWII.
Austria-Hungary, imperial sovereign bonds died with the empire in 1918, successor states refused to honour joint debt.
China, imperial and republican bonds were repudiated after 1949 by the PRC, continuity of the state was rejected.
Argentina, repeated sovereign defaults and restructurings since 2001 show monetary sovereignty does not prevent long-dated bond losses.