Why is Alphabet’s $118 billion cash pile posing a new problem for the tech giant?

Alphabet Inc. is facing a new and, by most accounts, welcome problem — how to spend its rapidly expanding pile of cash.

The Google owner generated nearly $29 billion in cash in the second quarter after cutting thousands of jobs and efforts to stanch losses in its various moonshot projects. That left Alphabet with cash and short-term marketable securities of about $118 billion, more than any other company in the Nasdaq 100 Stock Index aside from Apple Inc.’s total of about $167 billion.