Alphabet, the parent of Google, raised a record 85 billion dollars through a share sale - the largest such offering in history. And all that money goes into one thing: artificial intelligence.

The figure is not just enormous, it toppled the previous record. The highest capital offering until then was 70 billion dollars, set by the Brazilian oil company Petroleo Brasileiro back in 2010. Now that record is history.

The dynamics are interesting too. Alphabet originally planned to sell shares for 40 billion, but interest was so strong that the offering was oversubscribed - in the end raising 45 billion. Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway bought a stake worth 10 billion dollars. Another 40 billion is planned for the next quarter, bringing the total to 85.

„This is part of our multi-year investment strategy to capture the opportunity that AI carries and to support the demand we see from companies and consumers," said CEO Sundar Pichai. In translation: Google plans to spend 180 to 190 billion dollars on capital expenditure by the end of the year, mainly for AI infrastructure and data centres.

To be clear - Alphabet is not a company in trouble. In the first quarter alone it reported revenue of 110 billion dollars, growth of 22 percent year on year. Still, when a healthy company borrows that much, the question is not whether it can afford it, but why it thinks it must.

The answer lies in another figure. According to Goldman Sachs, over the next five years almost 8 trillion dollars have already been promised for artificial intelligence across the whole industry. That is a sum surpassing the economies of entire continents. Alphabet's offering is also a signal for a string of AI companies waiting their turn for the stock market - Anthropic, SpaceX, OpenAI. But all of it depends on one assumption: that investors will keep pouring money into promises, year after year. And promises, as the Balkans know well, do not always become factories.