13 ms·
Meta readies $25B bond sale as soaring AI costs trigger stock sell-off
- killingtime74 1y agohttps://archive.is/qlPU9 https://archive.is/qlPU9
- mdhb 1y agoIf Meta manages to die in the coming AI apocalypse it will make me extremely happy. They are an absolute cancer on society.
- apples_oranges 1y agoBut I just use Instagram to look at photography content. Am I helping to destroy society?
- bzzzt 1y agoEvery click you send to Meta is used to build your personal profile to generate ad revenue. So yes, you’re helping them in a very small way…
- Waterluvian 1y agoI think everyone has a right to opt out of politics. Nobody should have to pay attention or have opinions or be an activist. But that doesn’t mean their actions aren’t affecting the politics, nor does it make them immune from being judged.
- DecentShoes 1y agoHow on earth are you still getting Instagram to serve you photos and not month old tiktok videos? I haven't seen a photo in Instagram in years.
- ares623 1y agoUnironically yes? A very small amount, sure. But every eyeball counts.
- zkmon 1y agoIt used to have some survival instincts. It was gobbling young companies such as whatapp and insta to keep itself alive. But with metaverse they lost the plot and now desperate to cling on to AI wave. Yep, this dino is gone.
- edm0nd 1y agoI honestly think the world would be better without Meta if it did die. I'm sure other corpos would snatch up all their properties like Threads and IG but still it would be a net positive.
- aaronbrethorst 1y agoThis is fine. https://www.brethorsting.com/blog/2025/10/the-data-center-bubble/ https://www.brethorsting.com/blog/2025/10/the-data-center-bu...
- antoniuschan99 1y agoAI build out is more of an extension of datacenter build out though. All the hyperscalers lead AI build out. Fiber dailed because the telcos overbuilt and demand lagged. When Amazon introduced AWS it succeeded right away because there was lots of demand. Jeff Bezos Ted Talk 2003 - https://youtu.be/vMKNUylmanQ https://youtu.be/vMKNUylmanQ
- polar8 1y agoCloud and AI infra already pull in $300B+ a year. Data center vacancy under 1% and they’re power utility constrained. The fiber guys built ahead of demand, these guys are printing money and can’t build new printers fast enough.
- hagbarth 1y agoBut Meta specifically needs returns from AI products to justify the capex. Google and Microsoft eg. have profitable cloud businesses from where they can rent out GPU compute. Meta’s bet is far more risky.
- baxtr 1y agoTrue. But then again they own the consumer side. If Meta hadn’t invested in AI recommendations a while back they would have lost against TikTok big time.
- windexh8er 1y agoAs the Facebook generation dies out, so does Facebook. I just don't see it. Meta will have to continue to buy competition and hope that the ad market stays a racket forever. The only reason Meta is still relevant is advertising, just the same as Google. Eventually enough people will realize it for what it's worth: anti-competitive enshittification in order to preserve multi-billion dollar companies that have products and services that suck so bad you'd have a hard time paying people to use if they were startups today.
- dmix 1y ago> Oracle sold $18bn of bonds in September. Why is Oracle going into debt for AI? What are they doing
- lordofgibbons 1y agoBuilding data centers for OpenAI, but it requires a lot of upfront capital.
- diamond559 1y agoPumping the stonk one last time.
- donavanm 1y agofinancing huge deals for use of OCI https://finance.yahoo.com/news/oracle-corp-orcl-q4-2025-070138315.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/oracle-corp-orcl-q4-2025-0701.... See Q4 FY25 > Total Cloud Revenue (SaaS + IaaS): $6.7 billion, up 27%. CapEx (Full Year): $21.2 billion. The company is facing supply constraints, unable to meet the high demand for its cloud services, leading to scheduling customers into the future. Much lower name recognition for smaller customers. But there are some big big name "AI" & B2C companies who have _huge_ spend with OCI. This isnt "rent a couple of instances" its much more like "provide a couple GW of compute for X years."
- HelloUsername 1y agohttps://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-10-30/meta-platforms-offers-six-part-bond-amid-ai-spending-rush https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-10-30/meta-plat...
- asim 1y agoTens of billions spent on AI data centers. But people still starve across the planet. Amazing.
- dolphinscorpion 1y agoAnd many spent hundreds of dollars on a dinner when they could feed x poor people. Slipery slope
- all_factz 1y agoWe need dinners, we don’t need AI
- kcaseg 1y agoLast time I commented something very similar thinking it was the least controversial no brainer thing and multiple people reacted as if it was some Leninist ragebait lol
- OhioMan2943 1y agoConditioning- America is a capitalist social experiment and I mean that literally
- edm0nd 1y agoSeems pretty successful then no for being such a young country. America is literally where all the major tech and internet companies are.
- molteanu 1y agoWhere I'm pretty sure that the definition of "successful" that you have in mind is one given by America itself.
- OhioMan2943 1y ago
- kcaseg 1y agoOk, Metaverse and AI didn’t work out. But maybe betting billions on the Next Big Thing, while your actual product is descending into anarchy will pay off!
- whatsupdog 1y ago[flagged]
- emilsedgh 1y agoWhat was their vision for AI to begin with? I totally understand what OpenAI and Google are trying to do with AI but I never understood Meta's angle. What's Meta's AI product?
- daniel_iversen 1y agoWhat is NOT their angle; ads, UGC, entertainment experience (algo etc), Metaverse and gaming, communication (WhatsApp, insta etc) and I’m sure they’ll take advantage anything that’s close to their core areas of interest or anything else big. AI is definitely the tide that lifts all boats but if you’re one of the top 5 tech companies in the world then the prize is incredibly large and not yet known.
- diamond559 1y agoThe investors don't seem to agree, it seems to be sinking rn... Ads? They already sell ads, is their "AI" algorithm better than the current one developed over years by some of the smartest phds on the planet? I very much doubt that.
- utopiah 1y ago> What's Meta's AI product? They have several actually, from computer vision in glasses (RayBan or Quest) to Speech To Text to get commands on such glasses, to "improved" translation via LLMs, to just chat bots in most of their chat solutions. They do integrate into products, it's not just research. Is it good? No idea as I don't use them but I believe their angle is literally what Zuckerberg said publicly, roughly "Can't miss AI if it's real! Have to be first." which isn't exactly a very deep strategy but they have deep pockets.
- dangus 1y agoMore importantly, do these AI integrations they have make money or even have the potential to in the future? It might surprise you to find out that Ray-Ban Meta glasses don't offer any sort of subscription service, not even as an option. Every Meta AI user is just costing Meta money, Meta isn't even giving them the option to buy the product from them. I have no idea why. The kind of people who would buy Meta glasses would probably happily blow $10-20 on a subscription they forget about. You can get a subscription service for a robot litter box but you can't get one for AI glasses? Does Meta hate money? Meta uses AI to search through Facebook and Instagram which...just makes searches cost them more money, I guess? Sounds like they have pockets so deep that they are going into debt, which is an interesting sort of pocket depth. IMO Zuckerberg's amateur founder status is more blatant as time goes on. He had his one moonshot and thinks he can do it again just as easily. Nobody told him that a large chunk of his success is owed to fortuitous timing. I think there's been something of a cancerous ideology that you must be a first mover. It's a bit odd considering that Facebook itself was not a first mover in pretty much everything that it does that is successful and highly profitable.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- LarsDu88 1y agoI think Zuckerberg understands something that most people on this forum seem to not understand at all. Facebook, Instagram, etc... these are all only valuable as network effect monopolies. Investment into AI can torch billions of dollars and still be worthwhile so long as it's done in the service of protecting those monopolies, because LLMs are both intrinsically threatening to Meta's existence and intriniscally valuable for building better recommender systems when platform monopolists like Apple add privacy protections (cutting Meta off from the data spigot that powers its revenue streams). Once AIs with no wallets outnumber humans on Facebook, Meta has an existential problem. There is no way to avoid the inevitable, the best one can do is embrace it, and 25 billion is nothing compared to losing your platform.
- ares623 1y agoOr, the guy who cheats at Catan just needs the constant ego boost to be able to say "yeah I'm kind of a big deal in Next Big Thing"
- xnx 1y agoFacebook Libra, Metaverse, etc. Zuck is having a real hard time admitting to himself that Facebook was just luck.
- bdangubic 1y agoBezos is also having a hard time admitting amazon was just luck and gates is having a hard time admitting windows was just luck and … :)
- LarsDu88 1y agoFacebook, Amazon, and Microsoft were a product of very good timing, but I think we should not undersell how high the barrier to entry for Amazon and Microsoft were in the 90s and 70s specifically. Amazon basically started at the dawn of the internet, and I actually remember using it in 1997 as a fifth grader. It was incredibly well developed for that very early time period compared to just about everything else. Microsoft's first product was a BASIC interpreter written on a PDP mini-computer in assembly, and was written so quickly, Paul Allen wrote an entire emulator in assembly for the actual chip they were trying to run their software on. The bootloader for the tape loaded program had to be entered in binary onto the machine they were trying to run the software on. There were about a dozen people in position to create this sort of software in the world at the time and only two who could do it in a 6 week timeframe. Bill Gates and a lot of these other billionaires are in totally different leagues when it comes to origin story.
- DataDaemon 1y agoHow is going metaverse?
- andro_dev 1y agoThink of your 401k getting wiped out, they will let your 401k pay for these data centers. Think about it, these bonds have a 40-year lifespan. "The social media group had hired Citigroup and Morgan Stanley to raise up to $25bn in debt, ranging from five to 40 years in maturity, "
- ares623 1y agoAI will either steal retirement funds by making scams more realistic, or it will steal them by purchasing OpenAI's IPO.
- ic_fly2 1y agoWaiting for the lack of returns on LLM investments to come and bite back. Together with the debt payments needed then, this will do wonders for the stock. I’m sure.
- JonathanBeuys 1y agoI have not looked into Meta, but when I look at the growth of Alphabet's cloud revenue, it looks pretty solid: https://x.com/JonathanBeuys/status/1984882268817519036 https://x.com/JonathanBeuys/status/1984882268817519036 That is revenue from real world usage of their datacenters. Usage their customers would not pay for if it did not have a positive ROI. A pretty stable growth of 30% per year for the last 5 years. At a current level of about $50B per year. What is the value of it, if it continues like this for another decade? Revenue would be at roughly $1T/year then. In the face of this real usage and the growth of it, spending tens of billions of dollars on building out infrastructure looks ok to me.
- ares623 1y agoThat's literally just a line go up graph with no details whatsoever? Also, "According to Perplexity" why is it not "according to Alphabet"?
- JonathanBeuys 1y agoWhich additional details would you like to see? According to Perplexity because instead of going through 20 earnings reports myself, I outsourced the task to Perplexity and then manually checked a few of the numbers to be reasonably sure they were correct.
- ares623 1y agoOh, gotcha. I thought it was Perplexity themselves reporting about Google's earnings or something. Like how much of it is actually the "AI" part of the business for a start?
- JonathanBeuys 1y agoI would think that no matter what the percentage of AI in the revenue is - mankind keeps automating their work via software. And so far, we automated only very little. We probably can keep increasing it at 30% pa for 10 years. That would mean we just automate 14x more than we do now. In 10 years, that seems not even fast to me.
- tim333 1y ago>Zuck... “the right strategy to aggressively frontload building capacity” as part of the tech group’s bid to be the first to build artificial superintelligence. There's one problem. They seem unlikely to be first to build ASI given that Google and OpenAI seem a fair bit ahead and there's stiff competition from xAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek et al. The leaderboard seems to have Google, OpenAI and Antropic ahead, then X and four Chinese firms, Z, DeepSeek, GLM and Kimi, with Meta behind that. I'm not sure if they have a decent strategy to get ahead? It seems to me the best bet would be to have some very smart people do a better algorithm rather than building more data centers.
- solumunus 1y agoA better strategy would be to just focus and expand on what they do well while their competitors burn money with potentially no decent outcome.
- hulitu 1y ago> Meta readies $25B bond sale as soaring AI costs trigger stock sell-off Insider trading ? /s
- asterix99 1y agoMatt Levine's take on this: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2025-10-29/put-the-data-center-in-the-box https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2025-10-29/put...
- rchaud 1y agoMeta has $43 billion in cash and cash equivalents as of December 2024 [0]. What is the reason for not using part of those reserves, and issuing debt instead, costing them hundreds of millions in fees to investment banks and bondholders? Also, if they are issuing bonds to the public, does that mean that private lenders aren't lending any more? [0] https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/META/balance-sheet/ https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/META/balance-sheet/
- paxys 1y agoThe numbers are stupid yes but it's weird to me that Meta is bearing the brunt of it while Nvidia, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, OpenAI, Anthropic and all the rest continue to be rewarded by investors. If/when the bubble bursts everyone is going down.
- telotortium 1y ago1. Meta has released primarily open models until now. 2. Meta's models have always been somewhat behind the cutting edge, and the gap has grown wider as of Llama 4. 3. The AI orgs at Meta are in well-publicized shakeups, so investors are naturally skittish about the chaos there.
- ksec 1y agoIt seems Cloud and Datacenter is still in demand and are outstripping supply. Something I just dont understand. Where are they all coming from? It cant just be AI. I really wish there is some explanation of these capital investment.
- ASalazarMX 1y agoIt really is crypto and AI, and NVidia will suffer greatly if the AI bubble bursts before something new that demands their GPUs arrives. Right now AI is being shoehorned into everything, and the hunting season has to end at some point.