Matt Levine's take on this: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2025-10-29/put...
Tens of billions spent on AI data centers. But people still starve across the planet. Amazing.
>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.
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?
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.
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, "
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.
> Oracle sold $18bn of bonds in September.
Why is Oracle going into debt for AI? What are they doing
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.
How is going metaverse?
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.
> 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?
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.