On August 13, Alphabet’s (NASDAQ:GOOGL) Google unveiled Gemini 3.7 Flash, a new AI model built for coding and automated business tasks. The launch came without word on when the company’s flagship Gemini 3.5 Pro model will arrive, a gap investors have watched closely as a gauge of whether Google’s DeepMind unit can keep pace with Anthropic and OpenAI. It also landed the same week that Alphabet closed a $25 billion bond sale and posted its first-ever negative free cash flow quarter.
Bull Case: A Cheaper, Faster Gemini
Gemini 3.7 Flash arrived just three weeks after Gemini 3.6 Flash, a pace that signals Google is iterating quickly on the models it hopes will power autonomous AI agents. The new model targets businesses building systems that can plan tasks, use software tools, and complete multi-step workflows with less human oversight, and Google says it shows improved performance on coding tasks including debugging, issue resolution, and production-ready code generation. To win over developers, Google priced Gemini 3.7 Flash at 75 cents per million input tokens and $3.75 per million output tokens through the end of the year, half the original cost of Gemini 3.6 Flash. It is also rolling out immediately to Gemini Spark, Google’s subscription AI agent service available in more than 160 countries.
That pricing sits alongside a cloud business converting AI investment into revenue. Google Cloud’s backlog has climbed to $514 billion, and Alphabet expects to recognize a little more than half of it as revenue over the next 24 months. Alphabet also holds more than $240 billion in cash and marketable securities, giving it room to keep funding its buildout as free cash flow comes under pressure.
Bear Case: The Bill Comes Due
Alphabet’s capital expenditures are now guided to $195 billion to $205 billion for 2026, up from $91 billion in 2025 and $53 billion in 2024. Second-quarter capex alone was $45 billion, double the year-earlier figure, pushing Alphabet to a quarterly free cash flow loss of $5.9 billion. Buybacks have gone to zero, and Alphabet raised roughly $56 billion in debt plus about $50 billion from stock sales in the first half to help cover the gap.
That borrowing culminated in a $25 billion, ten-tranche bond sale that closed Monday, ranging from notes due in 2028 to a $2.5 billion tranche not due until 2066. Much of that money funds servers and networking gear that Alphabet itself depreciates over about six years, meaning a large share of this year’s spending will need to be repaid all over again long before the longest bonds come due.
