Alphabet Is Paying a Dividend While Selling $85 Billion of New Stock

Alphabet raised its quarterly dividend to $0.22 per share while launching an $84.75 billion capital raise through stock sales and debt issuance to fund AI infrastructure spending. The move marks a sharp reversal from 2025: the company spent $28.3 billion on share buybacks in the first half of last year but halted all repurchases in H1 2026.

Management projects capital expenditures of $195 billion to $205 billion for 2026, a spending plan that outpaces current cash generation and transforms shareholders from capital recipients into net funders. The simultaneous dividend increase and equity dilution signals Alphabet is prioritizing AI buildout over traditional capital return, even as it maintains the optics of shareholder-friendly payouts.

The $84.75 billion raise underscores the scale of capital required to compete in large language model training and inference infrastructure. Alphabet joins Meta and Microsoft in breaking from the shareholder-return playbook that defined the last decade of big tech.