Meta lifts its AI equity raise to $97.5 billion

What Meta is selling

Meta Platforms said on Tuesday it had increased its largest-ever equity fundraising to $97.5 billion, according to Reuters coverage carried by Zawya and the same wire report on Euronext. The company raised the common stock offering it announced on Monday from $22.5 billion to $25 billion, priced at $625.00 per share, and priced 250 million depositary shares at $50 per share.

The two public offerings come to about $37.5 billion: $25 billion of common stock and $12.5 billion of convertible preferred depositary shares. The Zawya copy of the report describes the public offerings as about $35 billion, which is the total before the common offering was increased from $22.5 billion, so the article uses the component sum and keeps that older figure attributed. Meta also plans a separate at-the-market share sale programme, in which a company sells shares gradually at prevailing prices, worth up to $60 billion. That programme will start after Meta's new non-voting Class C shares begin trading, which is expected in the first quarter of 2027, and the company has not finalised its timing or terms.

The chip suppliers are buying in

The offering has drawn interest of up to $5 billion in total from Nvidia, AMD and Broadcom for Class A shares, according to the report. In a separate statement, Nvidia said it would invest $3 billion in Meta's equity offering.

That is the detail that makes the financing unusual. Chip suppliers are helping to fund the expansion of one of their biggest customers, a flow of capital that the report says adds to concerns about circularity in the AI industry. The arrangement is legal and disclosed, but it means part of the demand for Meta's shares comes from companies that benefit when Meta buys more chips and builds more data centres.

The report does not say what Nvidia, AMD or Broadcom receive beyond shares. It does not describe any supply agreement tied to the investment, and it does not say whether the commitments are binding.

Why Meta needs the money

Meta has been pouring money into chips and data centres to compete with OpenAI and Anthropic. It has committed to spending about $825 billion in the future, driven mainly by data centres, AI infrastructure and cloud computing power, and last week it raised the lower end of its annual capital expenditure forecast to $135 billion to $145 billion.

The spending has changed the shape of Meta's finances. The company reported a $2.12 billion cash burn in the third quarter, its first negative free cash flow in more than a decade, compared with positive cash flow of $10.63 billion a year earlier. As of September 30 it had $82.45 billion in cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities and $80.92 billion in long-term debt, according to its latest quarterly filing.

Meta is not the only large technology company moving from cash to capital markets. Alphabet increased its equity offerings to $84.75 billion in June, according to the report, and the same week SpaceX said an Apollo Global Management affiliate would buy AI chips and server hardware and lease them to the company in a deal with total principal payments of about $40 billion.

The gap between committed spending and generated cash is what the equity sale addresses, and it explains why the total was increased within a day of the first announcement.

How the market read it

Meta's shares fell about 1% on Tuesday. Analysts at William Blair wrote that they expect investors to keep questioning the financing and the potential for future capital raises, while arguing that the move reinforces both Meta's confidence in long-term AI returns and the capital-intensive nature of pursuing them.

"We believe that Meta will ultimately produce a profitable AI business and its returns longer-term should help the company diversify, although the path may not be linear," the analysts said, according to the report. That is a judgement about the future, not a result in hand.

The report also notes the consumer side of the bet. Early popularity of Meta's consumer AI agent Muse and the release of a new series of AI models have helped partly justify the investment, though the report gives no user or revenue figures for either.

The report gives no full-year revenue or profit guidance for Meta, so the financing cannot be measured against a stated return target.

What the filings do not settle

The final size of the at-the-market programme is a ceiling, not a completed sale. Meta has not set its timing or terms, and the programme depends on Class C shares trading, which is expected in the first quarter of 2027. The company also plans to issue Class C stock in January 2027 in a move that effectively creates a two-for-one split while keeping chief executive Mark Zuckerberg's control.

The dilution is the other open question. The report gives the size of the offerings but not the resulting share count, the dilutive effect on existing holders, or how the proceeds split between data centres, chips and other AI work. It also does not say whether Meta will need to raise again if capital spending keeps rising, which is exactly the question William Blair expects investors to keep asking.

There is also the circularity question. If chip suppliers buy shares in a customer that then spends the money on their products, the cash flow is real but the demand signal is harder to read. Nothing in the report suggests impropriety; it simply makes the financing less informative about independent demand for Meta's AI business.

It also does not say what fees the banks underwriting the offerings will earn. Related coverage includes OpenAI's reported Google chip buy, Microsoft's Azure Maia expansion, and Industry. The antitrust questions around that hardware are covered in the site's report on Nvidia's Hugging Face deal.

How to read the raise

The facts are concrete: a $97.5 billion fundraising target, a $25 billion common offering at $625, 250 million depositary shares at $50, about $37.5 billion across the two public offerings, an up to $60 billion at-the-market programme, and up to $5 billion of interest from three chip companies, including a $3 billion commitment from Nvidia.

The context is equally concrete: about $825 billion of committed future spending, a $2.12 billion quarterly cash burn, $135 billion to $145 billion of capital expenditure this year and a balance sheet with roughly $82 billion in cash against $81 billion of long-term debt. Meta is not running out of money. It is choosing to fund an expensive buildout with equity rather than cash flow, and it is doing so at a scale that puts pressure on its share price.

For readers, the useful question is not whether AI spending is large. It is whether the returns arrive before the financing gets more expensive. This raise buys time and capacity; it does not answer that question.