Alphabet prices 100-year bond at +120bps over gilts as investors pile into $14B of orders

Alphabet just convinced investors to lend it money for a hundred years. And those investors practically fought over the privilege. The Google parent company priced a £1 billion 100-year sterling bond with a coupon rate of 6.125%, spread at roughly +120 basis points over 10-year UK gilts. The order book swelled to nearly 10 times the offered size, with bids reaching approximately £9.5 to £10 billion, or around $14 billion. In English: for every pound Alphabet wanted to borrow, investors offered nearly ten. The biggest tech century bond in decades This isn’t just a large bond sale. It’s the first major technology company to issue a century bond since Motorola did it back in 1997. That’s almost three decades of no Big Tech firm daring to ask the market for a 100-year commitment. The sterling tranche was part of a much larger capital raise. Alphabet’s total debt issuance exceeded $31.5 billion, anchored by a $20 billion US dollar bond sale that generated orders surpassing $100 billion at peak demand. There were also Swiss franc tranches in the mix. The yield on the century bond landed at approximately 6.05%. The +120bps spread over gilts reflects the kind of tight pricing that only the...