Google spent most of their cash, they are now taking loans for data centers too. They recorded their first quarter of negative cash flows ever

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runako 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Google has in excess of $121 billion of cash (& equivalents), net of total debt.

Big rich companies take on debt for reasons that are sometimes inscrutable from the outside. Recently, they have been borrowing for ~5%, about a half point above what the US government gets for 10-year Treasuries.

Apple has been financing operations with debt for a number of years as part of a complex optimization plan.

No, Google is not broke.

	▲	verdverm 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		There are a lot of accounting shenanigans going on in Big Ai, financial reports are misleading, eg Meta "building" a data center through a shell company and then renting it to themselves. It does wonders for the looks of the books Some expert wall street analysts discussing what they found and how they dissect things, have a healthy skepticism of Big Ai https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrJzjC4kKCY

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msabalau 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

In a quarter with record breaking income of over $100 billion, they also had negative $5.9 billion in free cash flow from their "bank account", because the people selling them chips and building them data centers want to be paid, while the investment itself is depreciated over time.

If my quick search is correct, Google is sitting on a quarter trillion dollars in cash and marketable securities. They could keep doing the negative cash flow thing at this scale for another decade.

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nolok 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Which is still a better position that the others? My point is you can't consider that a bad thing if you think it's ok for their competitors in the field. And if you don't and your judge them equally, then at least Google has its own cash glow and could turn the gas off at any point to go back to printing money while they have not choice.