Alphabet closed a $25 billion debt sale on Monday, with maturities stretching all the way out to 2066. The most notable piece is a 40-year tranche for $2.5 billion at a 6.5% interest rate. Their capex guidance for the year was recently raised to around $200 billion, mostly for servers and data centers. Because of this massive infrastructure spending, their free cash flow is running close to zero and buybacks have essentially stopped. Alphabet's long-term debt has jumped from $46.5 billion at the start of the year to roughly $123 billion after this sale. The 40-year bonds seem to match the lifespan of physical data centers and power infrastructure, rather than the servers themselves which are usually replaced every six years. It looks like they are setting up for AI hardware to be a permanent, recurring expense.