Meta Starts Bond Sale of at Least $20 Billion in Dollars and Euros to Fund AI Spending

The deal would include Meta's first euro-denominated bonds and comes about a week after it set out an equity programme of up to $97.5 billion, according to Bloomberg.

By Nakoda News Desk

2 days ago·2 min read

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Meta Platforms has started marketing US dollar bonds for the first time in six months, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday. The sale is part of a plan to raise at least $20 billion in debt in the United States and Europe to pay for the company's artificial intelligence infrastructure.

According to Bloomberg's reporting, carried by MarketScreener, Meta hired Citigroup and Morgan Stanley to gauge investor demand on Monday and Tuesday. The dollar bonds would mature in five to 30 years. The euro bonds would have maturities from about four years to more than 38 years. Bloomberg said no final decision had been made and that the total could rise if demand is strong. Meta and the banks did not immediately respond to requests for comment, according to the report.

The euro tranche would be Meta's first borrowing in the single currency. Semafor, citing people familiar with the matter, described the deal as including the company's first-ever euro borrowing for up to $15 billion. That figure is lower than the minimum of $20 billion Bloomberg reported for the whole offering, and the reports do not make clear how the two numbers relate.

Debt After a Large Equity Raise

The bond sale follows a financing programme Meta announced about a week earlier that could raise up to $97.5 billion in equity, according to the Bloomberg report. That programme includes $25 billion of common stock, $12.5 billion of mandatory convertible preferred securities, and up to $60 billion from gradual share sales into the market.

Together, the equity programme and the planned bonds show how much outside capital Meta now needs to keep up its data centre build-out, as spending on AI infrastructure runs ahead of what the company generates from its operations.

Part of a Wider Borrowing Push

Meta is going to bond investors at a time when the largest US technology companies are borrowing heavily to fund AI. In the past week, Amazon disclosed an $80 billion secured facility, Microsoft returned to the US bond market, Oracle raised $20 billion from bonds and shares, and Alphabet sold €6 billion of euro bonds. Semafor reported that the hyperscalers have largely exhausted US markets and are now looking to other pools of capital, noting that Alphabet has also issued debt in sterling, Swiss francs and yen this year, including a 100-year bond.

Investors are paying closer attention to the cost of that spending. European technology shares fell on Tuesday as investors reassessed AI outlays, and Pimco chief executive Emmanuel Roman told a Hong Kong summit this week that AI financing could reach $10 trillion and eventually become too much.

For Gulf investors and sovereign funds, which have been large buyers of US technology debt and are building their own AI infrastructure, the size and pricing of Meta's deal will be a useful test of how much appetite global bond markets still have for AI-related borrowing.