Meta Goes Back to Wall Street for $95B to Feed Its AI Ambitions

Meta is opening the floodgates. The company said Monday it plans to raise $95 billion in stock, a staggering sum aimed squarely at AI infrastructure and what it calls superintelligence. The raise comes in two pieces: an initial $35 billion in underwritten public equity offerings, followed by another $60 billion through an at-the-market program.

Investors took it in stride early on. Meta shares climbed 1.6% in premarket trading after the announcement, a calm reaction to a nine-figure-hundreds-of-millions-scale ask that would normally rattle a tech giant's stock.

Where's the money going? Meta says the cash will chase what it describes as emerging AI opportunities, spanning its family of apps, its AI agent Muse and its data center business. Translation: more compute, more silicon, more buildings to hold it all.

The timing is notable. Last week, Meta reported third-quarter revenue of $64.60 billion, up 26% year over year and ahead of the $63.37 billion analysts had penciled in. But the beat got buried under worries about negative free cash flow and a higher full-year capital expenditure forecast — a combination that knocked the stock lower that day.

That capex number is the one to watch. Meta now guides full-year capital spending to a range of $135 billion to $145 billion, lifting the bottom end from a previous $130 billion. The market's patience with AI spending is being tested across the sector, and Meta just made its bet bigger.

This is a breaking news story, and the details are still developing. What's already clear: Meta isn't slowing down, it's asking shareholders to fund the next lap.