Alphabet raised $62B in dilutive equity in Q2-Q3; MarketWatch flags Meta's $95B offering as 5.9% dilution to fund AI buildout
What happened
A MarketWatch column by Philip van Doorn, published Nov 4, 2026 and carried on Morningstar, reports that Alphabet and Meta have both reversed their long-term policies of shrinking share counts through buybacks and are instead carrying out dilutive stock offerings to fund the AI infrastructure buildout. The column itemizes Alphabet's raises for the first time: $49.6 billion in Q2 through common and mandatorily convertible stock offerings, plus another $12.4 billion in Q3 through common shares. Using FactSet data on quarterly average diluted common share counts, the column shows that among the 10 largest S&P 500 components, Alphabet posted the highest one-year share-count increase (+1.4% through Sept. 30), reversing a long-term declining trend (-8.6% over five years, -11.5% over ten). For Meta, the column calculates that the Oct 22 offering of up to $95 billion would translate into about 152.97 million new shares, or 5.9% of the third quarter's 2.573 billion diluted share count, at the Tuesday $621.03 close — lowering EPS by roughly 5.6%, all else equal. Amazon (+0.8% one-year) and Tesla (+0.4%) also increased share counts, while Apple remains the buyback leader (-32.2% over ten years, $769.32B in repurchases).
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- Alphabet (GOOGL): disclosed $49.6B of common + mandatorily convertible offerings in Q2 and $12.4B of common-share offerings in Q3 to fund AI infrastructure and computing-power buildout; highest one-year share-count increase (+1.4%) among the top 10 S&P 500 constituents.
- Meta Platforms (META): Oct 22 announced offerings of up to $95B (common plus mandatorily convertible preferred converting to common in Aug 2029); at a $621.03 share price that implies ~153M new shares, ~5.9% of Q3's 2.573B diluted share count, lowering EPS by ~5.6% all else equal.
- Broad peer read-through (Amazon, Tesla): both also showed one-year share-count increases (+0.8%, +0.4%), a departure from the buyback era; investors pricing AI capex are increasingly factoring dilution, not just free-cash-flow erosion.
Sources