Meta Draws Record €53 Billion of Orders for Debut Euro Bond Sale

The demand was nearly six times the amount on offer. According to Bloomberg, it beat the previous European record of more than €31 billion, set by Anheuser-Busch InBev in 2016. Reuters converted the order total to $59.52 billion.

The sale shows that bond investors are still willing to fund the AI spending of the largest technology companies, even as share prices of AI-linked companies have fallen. Meta is borrowing to pay for data centres, computing power and cloud capacity, and it is now tapping euro investors as well as the US dollar market.

The euro deal is split into six tranches, with maturities from just over four years to more than 38 years, according to a person familiar with the matter cited by Reuters. Citigroup and Morgan Stanley are running the sale, which was expected to price later on Wednesday. Initial price guidance put the shortest tranches at about 140 basis points over mid-swaps and the longest at about 370 basis points, according to reports of the terms. Final pricing and the final size had not been confirmed at the time of writing.

The euro offering came a day after Meta sold $15 billion of bonds in five parts in the US market. That deal attracted as much as $58 billion of orders, about 3.9 times the amount sold. Investors demanded more to hold the new debt than they did in the spring. The 30-year portion, $2.75 billion with a 7.5 per cent coupon, priced at 220 basis points over Treasuries, compared with 132 basis points on Meta's 30-year bonds sold in April. Across the five maturities common to both sales, final spreads were between 57 and 88 basis points wider than in April.

Together, the two deals will raise at least $20 billion. They are Meta's first investment-grade bond sales since April. The company's total debt stood at $83.67 billion at the end of September, according to LSEG data cited by Reuters.

The borrowing comes as rating agencies look more closely at the cost of the AI build-out. S&P Global Ratings has revised its outlook on Meta to negative, citing the prospect of a third straight year of cash burn. S&P projects a free cash flow deficit of $71 billion in 2027 and capital spending above $225 billion by that year. Those are the agency's projections, not company guidance.

Other large technology groups have also been borrowing heavily. Microsoft raised $25 billion in bonds last week, and Alphabet sold €6 billion of euro debt earlier this year.

The sale also launched on the first full trading day after Democrats won control of both houses of Congress. That result initially weighed on AI and data centre stocks, which investors expect to face tougher scrutiny on power use and local permits. The size of the euro book suggests that, for now, credit investors see Meta's debt as a separate question from the political risks facing the AI build-out.