Meta readies $25B bond sale as soaring AI costs trigger stock sell-off

6 days ago (ft.com)

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.

  • 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.

    • Your idea of what would "make the user experience better" can be very different from what actually makes the experience more profitable to Meta.

      As far as I can tell, the things that actually drives engagement are ragebait political videos, thirst traps, and fake AI generated videos of cats robbing liquor stores.

      The investors have rewarded Meta with something like 5x stock increase since abandoning the Metaverse.

      It's time to realize that "embrace the stupid" is indeed a viable business strategy and an accurate reflection of our society.

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    • Their financial stability all hinges on having lot's of user engagement. As we've seen, optimizing for engagement tends to be a pretty awful user experience. That doesn't matter to them if the numbers go up that they want to go up.

  • 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"

This is fine. https://www.brethorsting.com/blog/2025/10/the-data-center-bu...

  • 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

  • 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.

    • 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.

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    • Is the edge node revenue in the customer/infra graph from investor spend or customer spend? Almost certainly the former, right?

Tens of billions spent on AI data centers. But people still starve across the planet. Amazing.

  • 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?

    • 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.

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    • Poor argumentation. If I spend 25 billion on movies and still have enough money to never care you should ask me again.

    • Quite the stretch when you compare a bike to trillions wasted on products that 1) don't generally benefit humanity 2) could actually be used for real research instead of preserving an ad racket.

      But, yeah. Keep comparing the egregious billionaires looking to lock out competition and hold on to their billions with all their might! Clearly it has to be the bike or board games the normies own, though. FFS.

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  • Gambling market in US has $100bn+ revenue. Tobacco sales in US is $70bn+

    People starve and (almost) no one cares.

    • 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.

  • Michigan has plenty of water. But California still has droughts sometimes. Amazing (if you're 14).

  • Population numbers in all areas where this is widespread exploded after the introduction of efficient agriculture from outside. Like if lack of food was the root problem, we would expect population in these places to be decreasing, not increasing, right? Something other than food scarcity is at play here.

    • That's a logical fallacy. Population growth can outgrow food supply thanks to high fertility and access to better hygiene and medical treatment from outside combined with a lack of birth control. So you would still see population growth, but a growing fraction of this population could be malnourished.

      That being said, the most common reason is simply war. If you look at the famine in Sudan right now, it is a direct consequence of the civil war (which also happens to be the biggest and bloodiest war by far in the world right now). Lost crops from weather or diseases can also restrict local food production, but it only ever really turns into a problem when armed groups prevent outside food supplies from moving to affected areas like the military in Sudan does right now.

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  • 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

  • i think a good counter to this sort of argument is :

    https://launiusr.wordpress.com/2012/02/08/why-explore-space-...

    • Wow! This has aged really, really badly. 50 years and many billions of dollars later and we're neither on the Moon or Mars or have significantly enhanced the distribution of food to those in need, let alone international cooperation.

      Higher food production through survey and assessment from orbit, and better food distribution through improved international relations, are only two examples of how profoundly the space program will impact life on Earth.

      As good counters go, this underperforms.

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  • People in other countries starve because the people in charge of them are evil not because the people with resources lack benevolence. If you've ever tried to do charity in a foreign country with a foreign culture and language you would be aware of the issues. No amount of outside money in the world could fix these problems. In fact they will make it worse. People need to grow up.

    In the United States, starvation doesn't exist so we've expanded the definition to include more people because we really care to feed people. If you've been to countries where actual starvation is a possibility, you'd understand. So tired of this self hating unaware self flagellation.

    • This is seen in that starvation is effectively solved in the USa (and now runs the other direction; the poor in the US often tend toward obesity instead of starvation).

      The “solution” to countries with starvation today is likely massive full-scale invasion and domination; something the modern world doesn’t have an appetite for.

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  • In their own country, even.

    Even just to save face, I would have expected one of the billionaires to have started a foundation tackling the problem in some way.

  • And there you are with your fancy computer! Sell it and feed the poor.

    • 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.

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  • Birth rates are >4 in most of those starving regions. Family planning needed first.

    • That is the cart before the horse. Families, and women specifically, need stability and reasonable guarantees that fewer babies will be more likely to survive before they will stop having 4.

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  • Technological innovation veils our failed morality. I don’t ever see this resolving without God literally showing up to Earth.

>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.

  • A better strategy would be to just focus and expand on what they do well while their competitors burn money with potentially no decent outcome.

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?

  • > 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.

    • More 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.

  • 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.

    • 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.

  • Meta's goal is to stop OpenAI, Google and/or Anthropic from shutting them out of whatever AI ends up delivering. This is why they went with open weights for LLama - it prevents the other players becoming gatekeepers.

    This is part of a pattern of tech leaders investing in order to avoid getting shut-out of whatever the next paradigm of computing is supposed to be.

    - Google building Google+ and stuffing social into everything to avoid getting shut out of social networking. (The fear Larry/Sergey felt about this is why Vic Gundotra could bully and survive scandals until it became clear that Facebook wasn't an existential threat/Google+ was not going to really compete)

    - Meta attempting to build an AI assistant because they were afraid Alexa/Google Assistant/Siri would be how everyone accessed computers in the future (due to technical failure, this product only ever launched as control mechanism for Oculus, but the ambition was larger)

    Of course this always come alongside other factors that lead others to follow when a new concept is proven; however a tell-tale sign that leadership is worried about market dominance rather than a mere new line of business is that they spend or throw weight around above and beyond what the new line of business alone would justify.

  • Many, but one often overlooked is experiences of a pornographic or erotic character.

    This is one of the most important future uses of what we today call chat bots and "AI".

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.

  • That's literally just a line go up graph with no details whatsoever? Also, "According to Perplexity" why is it not "according to Alphabet"?

    • 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.

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  • > 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.

    • 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.

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  • > Usage their customers would not pay for if it did not have a positive ROI.

    I don't think we can assume that's true. Their customers are paying for it, but we don't know how profitable they are being with the AI compute they pay for.

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, "

  • AI will either steal retirement funds by making scams more realistic, or it will steal them by purchasing OpenAI's IPO.

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!

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.

If Meta manages to die in the coming AI apocalypse it will make me extremely happy. They are an absolute cancer on society.

  • It 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.

  • I 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.

  • But I just use Instagram to look at photography content. Am I helping to destroy society?

    • I 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.

    • Every 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…

    • How 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.

> Oracle sold $18bn of bonds in September.

Why is Oracle going into debt for AI? What are they doing

  • 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."

It 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.

  • It 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.

The 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.

  • 1. 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.

> Meta readies $25B bond sale as soaring AI costs trigger stock sell-off

Insider trading ? /s

Meta 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/