alt Hacker NewsCapital is cheap for Google because they are making a lot of money and they have very little debt.
They are considered a very low risk and can borrow for a long time at low rates. They recently issued a 100 year bond.
They seem to have decided to issue equity rather than borrow more. This is probably so that they can maintain the ability to borrow very cheaply in future if necessary.
Sorry I am not buying into that. In your logic they should issue more debt. Their operating margin is lowest compared to Microsoft and meta. If oil goes to 200 tomorrow their profit margin will be squeezed most along with meta. (Ads) Backlog in cloud does not mean shit imo. They can slow roll it. Matter of fact half of that backlog seems backed by anthropic anyway. So imagine anthropic not making money because of a down turn and going down. Who will pay the backlog? This is exactly why they are diluting their stock instead of issuing more debt, they don't want to put all their eggs in one basket and want to retain capital for such downturn. That's how I read it.