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 A.I. 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 ahead of the planned initial public offering of Anthropic, the A.I. behemoth behind the Claude chatbot, which is expected later this year and could further compete for investor interest.
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 A.I. 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 A.I., 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 non-voting shares. Earlier this month, the company said it would create a class of non-voting 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 its chief executive, 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, A.I. 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 A.I. chips, the company said in a news release. SpaceX uses its data centers to power its own A.I. model, Grok, and leases some of its other compute capacity to other A.I. 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 includes BlackRock and certain accounts advised by KKR.
On Sunday, Mr. Musk hinted at future pain for so-called neocloud organizations, which build data centers to then lease computing power to A.I. firm, in a post on his social media 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,” Mr. Musk wrote, predicting a near future of failure and consolidation for some of the companies.
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