Meta and SpaceX to raise billions more to fund AI ambitions

As the tech industry faces questions about the huge spending on infrastructure needed to power artificial intelligence, some of the largest companies are raising tens of billions of dollars to drive their ambitions.

On Monday morning, Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, announced it could raise up to $95 billion from selling stock. Shortly after, SpaceX, the AI and rocket company led by Elon Musk, said it had closed a $40 billion debt round to pay for the chips it needed for its data centers.

The two announcements come before the planned initial public offering of Anthropic, the AI behemoth behind the Claude chatbot, which is expected later this year and could further compete for investor interest. The company unveiled financial figures Monday, paving the way for an offering that could aim to raise more than $100 billion in what may be the world’s largest IPO.

In a financial disclosure earlier this month, Meta acknowledged the competitive market, and said it would be “prudent” to raise more money “before even more companies have absorbed available capital.”

“Recent significant capital raises at other notable companies, and others soon anticipated to take place, to fund the same AI growth — for example, Alphabet, SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI — have resulted in an increasingly challenging environment for raising capital,” the company said in the filing.

Meta, SpaceX and others are all spending billions of dollars in a global race to dominate AI, building massive data centers and buying up chips to power the technology. But the spending has also caused some jitters in the market, with technology stocks largely falling in the past month.

Meta declined to comment. SpaceX did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The financing announced by Meta on Monday includes a $35 billion stock offering, as well as the sale of another $60 billion in nonvoting shares. Earlier this month, the company said it would create a class of nonvoting shares that would help it raise capital, compensate employees and aid in potential acquisitions, while preserving the majority control over shareholder decision-making enjoyed by CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Meta said in its announcement that chipmakers including Nvidia, AMD and Broadcom had indicated interest in purchasing a total of $5 billion in the stock offering. Critics have previously raised concerns about this type of circular financing, as chipmakers, AI labs and computing providers that do business together have also invested in or lent money to one another, deeply intertwining their financial fates.

SpaceX raised $40 billion to lease equipment for data centers and called it “the largest committed” financing for AI chips, the company said in a news release. SpaceX uses its data centers to power its own AI model, Grok, and leases some of its other compute capacity to other AI companies including Google and Anthropic.

Lead investors in the deal include Apollo and Goldman Sachs, which also advised in structuring the deal, SpaceX said. Other investors include BlackRock and certain accounts advised by KKR.

On Sunday, Musk hinted at future pain for so-called neocloud organizations, which build data centers to then lease computing power to AI firms, in a post on his social platform X.

“As of the past few weeks, debt markets have almost entirely shut off access to money for any company that doesn’t have substantial revenue independent of AI data centers,” Musk wrote, predicting a near future of failure and consolidation for some of the companies.