Meta plans up to $95 billion stock sale, its first since 2013
The two-part sale uses new nonvoting shares to protect Mark Zuckerberg’s control and tops the $85 billion Alphabet said in June it would raise.
In brief
- Meta plans $35 billion in underwritten offerings and a $60 billion at-the-market program
- Nvidia, AMD and Broadcom are interested in buying up to $5 billion of the shares
- Meta’s new class C shares carry no voting rights, protecting Zuckerberg’s control
Meta said on Monday it plans to raise up to $95 billion by selling new shares to fund its data centers, with Nvidia, AMD and Broadcom interested in buying up to $5 billion of the stock.
Bloomberg reported that the sale ranks among the largest equity offerings in history. It is Meta’s first share issuance since 2013 and tops the stock sales announced this year by Alphabet, at $85 billion, and Oracle, at $25 billion, according to Semafor.
Meta will first raise $35 billion through underwritten public offerings, in which banks buy the shares and resell them to investors. It will then sell a further $60 billion through an at-the-market program, which issues new stock gradually at prevailing prices, CNBC reported. The three chipmakers would act as cornerstone investors, early buyers that anchor demand, in the first part, Meta said.
The at-the-market sales will use Meta’s new class C shares, which the company created days before the announcement and which carry no voting rights, so they can be sold without diluting the control of Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, the Guardian reported. Bloomberg reported that the offering includes both common and preferred stock.
Meta said the money will support “Meta’s continued investment in AI infrastructure and personal superintelligence,” including its apps, its agent Muse, software that carries out tasks on a user’s behalf, and its data center business. The company said it is building four “superclusters” of more than one gigawatt each and expects to nearly double its infrastructure capacity in 2026.
The decision “reflects the eye-watering levels of investment required to keep up in the AI arms race,” Ben Wood, senior partner at CCS Insight, told CNBC. Meta shares rose 1.6% in premarket trading, while CoreWeave and Iren, neocloud operators that lease computing power to AI companies, fell more than 2% after Elon Musk wrote on X on Sunday that most such firms face “guppy-level death,” as covered earlier.
In third-quarter results released days before the offering, Meta reported revenue up 26% from a year earlier to $64.60 billion, above the $63.37 billion analysts expected. Its shares fell as investors focused on negative free cash flow and a full-year capital spending forecast of $135 billion to $145 billion, with the bottom of the range raised from $130 billion.