Meta readies $25B bond sale as soaring AI costs trigger stock sell-off
82 comments
·November 2, 2025asim
krona
Capital misallocation do be like that, but I don't think that capital would be feeding children in the Congo if it wasn't for Facebook's latest folly.
loeg
The issue is mostly the corrupt elites that control these impoverished counties, not foreign aid or lack thereof.
null
notmyjob
If more capitalists were Christian it might. I mean there are capitalists and then there are capitalists.
SR2Z
Unless you're gonna no-true-Scotsman this, plenty of wealthy Christians are deeply unpleasant and selfish people. Going to church does not make people good.
dns_snek
Christian capitalist is an oxymoron.
esseph
You cannot be both a good Christian and a good Capitalist. It is an "or", not an "and".
wewewedxfgdf
No doubt you have a nice bike or computer or you spend money on something often like movies or board games or something.
Do you argue that money should all go to feeding the hungry?
asim
I donate part of my wealth to the poor every year and whatever more I feel is adequate based on a code of law e.g religion. I am just an individual. If I was a multi billion dollar conglomerate that incentive would be much higher. To bring the world out of poverty is to enrich all of humanity and my work would benefit from that as more people would benefit from the technology I built. But if the incentive is to spend everything and borrow more to build data centers to fuel addictive services and exploit people then this is quite a disservice to mankind.
ponector
Humanity is enormously rich. Compare to the state of humanity 200y ago. Pretty much everyone was struggling to survive, to get food and some heat.
Nowadays even the poorest countries are not starving, unless there is a war going on.
consp
Poor argumentation. If I spend 25 billion on movies and still have enough money to never care you should ask me again.
ic_fly2
What a dumb take.
kcaseg
Last 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
chii
i think a good counter to this sort of argument is :
https://launiusr.wordpress.com/2012/02/08/why-explore-space-...
loeg
Michigan has plenty of water. But California still has droughts sometimes. Amazing (if you're 14).
ponector
Gambling market in US has $100bn+ revenue. Tobacco sales in US is $70bn+
People starve and (almost) no one cares.
asim
Yes also huge problems and many other industries to speak of. Unfortunately as technology dominates and the most valuable company in the world is producing GPUs we know where it's all headed. I think while gambling and narcotics are very addictive and terrible we have overlooked technology and it's crept up on us in a bad way. Screens are horribly addictive. Maybe even worse than those things mentioned because you can be indoctrinated from birth. Because the cost is almost zero and continuous and the advancements are only trying to drive further addiction e.g Meta's heavy investment in AR and VR. AR/VR plus AI is basically the recipe for virtual worlds which people will prefer over real life. So we'll become even more disillusioned to the worlds problems because we'll prefer to escape to some virtual reality where all our desires are serviced.
CamperBob2
And there you are with your fancy computer! Sell it and feed the poor.
steve_adams_86
Their fancy computer's value is a mote compared to the billions of dollars being poured into AI software and infrastructure. It's a dead horse that shouldn't be beaten anymore. Individual choices are so insignificant as to be effectively meaningless in contexts like this.
asim
What if what I donate every year is 100x the value of a laptop I've owned for 5 years? Your logic is illogical.
ivape
Technological innovation veils our failed morality. I don’t ever see this resolving without God literally showing up to Earth.
andro_dev
Think 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
AI will either steal retirement funds by making scams more realistic, or it will steal them by purchasing OpenAI's IPO.
aaronbrethorst
antoniuschan99
AI 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
polar8
Cloud 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
But 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
True. 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.
ic_fly2
Waiting 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.
emilsedgh
What 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
What 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
The 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
> 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.
kcaseg
Ok, 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
Kek. (Before you downvote me for low effort comment, that's the entirety of my argument.)
LarsDu88
I 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.
diamond559
So, burn tens of billions to infest your own site w/ bots bc it is somehow "inevitable" anyway? Why not spend that to try and make the user experience better for users with wallets? The investors are clearly fed up w/ burning cash and racking up debt w/ no profits to show for it.
ares623
Or, 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"
JonathanBeuys
I 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
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
That's literally just a line go up graph with no details whatsoever? Also, "According to Perplexity" why is it not "according to Alphabet"?
JonathanBeuys
Which 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
Oh, 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?
oskarkk
> What is the value of it, if it continues like this for another decade? Revenue would be at roughly $1T/year then.
That's a big "if", usually things don't grow at 30% per year for 15 years.
JonathanBeuys
Do I understand your logic correctly that after 14 years of 30% growth another year is extremely unlikely and after 14.99 years it is almost impossible?
My logic is that we only have to take the next 10 years into account when calculating the probability.
And lots of things grew 30% or more for 10 years.
Bitcoin's market cap grew over 70% pa for 10 over years now.
Amazon's revenue grew over 60% pa for over 10 years in their early days.
I can think of many numbers, but would have to check: global solar installations, smartphone usage are examples that come to mind.
oskarkk
My logic is that past results don't indicate future results, and assuming that the growth rate from the last 5 years will stay the same for the next 10 years is a big "if". For new companies, new products, high growth rates over many years are normal, but we're talking about an established market that has already seen big growth rates over a long time (as the other commenter pointed out). Smartphone sales today are the same as in 2015, because there's an obvious ceiling to growth in that market, and it has been reached a long time ago. Number/power of solar installations is also a very different thing than revenue, because the growth in that market is caused by the rapidly falling prices (~10x in the last 15 years), so the installed power grows much faster than the cumulative cost of that power. As the computing power is still getting cheaper, and cloud usage is already high, with many competitors, I'd expect the revenue growth to slow down in the next 10 years.
anilgulecha
Cloud spend overall has - CAGR of 30-35% from 2007 to 2025.
null
dmix
> Oracle sold $18bn of bonds in September.
Why is Oracle going into debt for AI? What are they doing
donavanm
financing huge deals for use of OCI 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."
lordofgibbons
Building data centers for OpenAI, but it requires a lot of upfront capital.
diamond559
Pumping the stonk one last time.
Tens of billions spent on AI data centers. But people still starve across the planet. Amazing.