Meta Platforms has sold $15 billion of US dollar bonds, its first bond sale in the investment-grade market since April, as it works to fund a costly buildout of data centers for its artificial intelligence business. Investors looking for higher returns helped drive demand for the offering.

A two-currency deal worth at least $20 billion

The dollar notes form one half of a cross-border transaction that Meta expects to exceed $20 billion in total. The other half is a euro-denominated bond, the first of its kind for the company, which could hit the market on Thursday.

The dollar portion is divided into five tranches with maturities ranging from five to 30 years. Initial pricing estimates put the five-year notes at 130 basis points above US Treasury rates and the 30-year bonds at 250 basis points. The seven-, 10- and 20-year tranches were priced at spreads of 165, 185 and 230 basis points over Treasuries, respectively.

Those spreads measure the premium Meta is paying to borrow: one basis point equals one-hundredth of a percentage point, and each spread represents the extra yield investors earn over US government debt, the benchmark against which corporate borrowing costs are typically set.

Meta intends to use the proceeds to expand its AI infrastructure. The sheer cost of building these systems has pushed the company into the debt market, despite a long history of funding investments with its own cash.

Appetite for AI debt has thinned since April, when Meta raised $25 billion and drew peak orders worth $96 billion for that sale.

Big Tech floods the bond market

Meta is not borrowing alone. Oracle raised $10 billion on Tuesday, while Alphabet sold euro bonds to raise €6 billion, or roughly $6.73 billion, Yahoo Finance reported. Microsoft raised $25 billion last week, ending a near three-month pause in bond sales by major technology companies.

Dealroom estimates that Alphabet, Meta, Oracle and Amazon have raised nearly $90 billion combined through bond sales since September.

The wave of borrowing underscores how much capital companies now need to compete in AI. Bloomberg Intelligence expects major cloud and AI infrastructure companies to spend nearly $4.5 trillion over the next three years, though it remains unclear when those investments will start paying off.

There are signs investors are growing more cautious about how much debt the market can absorb. According to Dealroom, Meta's bonds now show the widest gap between their yields and those of other highly rated corporate bonds since 2003 — meaning investors now demand the largest premium over comparable highly rated bonds in more than two decades.

Alongside the fundraising, Meta is rolling out its latest AI model, Muse Wonder. Company executives say the new model can match ChatGPT and Claude on coding and difficult financial and legal tasks.