Alphabet, the parent company of Google, dipped into one of the bond market’s stranger corners this week.

The company sold a 1 billion British pound century bond, about $1.37 billion in U.S. dollars, with a 6.125% coupon as part of its plan to spend $185 billion this year building out artificial intelligence infrastructure. The deal came alongside $20 billion of additional Google debt issued earlier in the week. Demand ran hot for the Methuselah bond. Investors placed roughly 10 billion pounds of orders for the 1 billion pound bond. Alphabet’s century bond lands in the middle of an AI borrowing boom. Together, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Alphabet and Oracle tapped debt markets for $121 billion in 2025 as data-center spending accelerated.

Century bonds aren’t new, but they’re also not common. Forecasting interest rates, creditworthiness and competitive dynamics even a decade ahead stretches the imagination, and a century multiplies that uncertainty. A 100-year promise simply feels more conceivable at the sovereign level, where institutions can span generations. Corporate issuers face a harder test. Industries change. Technology moves fast. Entire business models fade away. Hard data on how long companies survive is scarce, though one proxy comes from the S&P 500. A 2017 study by Innosight found the average company stays in the index for about 20 years (it was 35 years in the 1960s), a measure of how long firms remain competitive enough to matter in the........

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