Meta readies $25B bond sale as soaring AI costs trigger stock sell-off (www.ft.com)

Meta is preparing to raise roughly $25 billion through a bond sale as investors reacted to soaring AI investment costs with a stock sell-off. The capital raise is intended to fund an aggressive buildout of AI infrastructure — from GPU-heavy training clusters and datacenter expansion to custom hardware, networking and talent — as Meta ramps up development and deployment of large foundation models and AI-powered products. The market reaction underscores investor concern about the near-term cash burn required to compete in generative AI. For the AI/ML community this is a clear signal that hyperscalers are doubling down on compute-intensive model development, which will keep demand for accelerators (GPUs and custom AI chips), high-bandwidth interconnects and power-hungry datacenters extremely strong. It also raises practical implications: more pressure to optimize training and inference (quantization, pruning, distillation, sparsity, algorithmic improvements), tighter supply dynamics for hardware vendors, and potential centralization of model capabilities among deep-pocketed firms. At the same time, the influx of capital can accelerate research, open-model efforts and tooling, but will also shape competition around cost-efficiency, proprietary hardware stacks, and where large-scale models are trained and hosted.