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Meta announces $95bn fundraising drive to pay for AI expansion – business live

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2h agoMeta to raise $95bn to help fund AI plans

Boom! Meta has just announced plans to raise up to $95bn to help pay for its massive AI ambitions.

The company behind Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp is kicking off a new fundraising drive to fund “its core business and emerging AI opportunities”.

The fundraising comes in two parts.

First, Meta plans to raise $35bn through new “underwritten public offerings” – a sale of company stock.

This offering has some big name backers – Nvidia, AMD and Broadcom have all shown interest in taking part, Meta says. These ‘cornerstone investors’ could buy up to $5bn of the stock on offer.

Second, Meta also plans to launch a $60bn “at-the-market offering” – in which it will sell new common stock to investors at the going market rate in future.

The Silicon Valley giant says these plans will support “Meta’s continued investment in AI infrastructure and personal superintelligence”.

It also says it is “investing with financial discipline,” saying:

double quotation markAI is creating significant opportunities for Meta across its core business and new products and services. Meta’s AI investments are already generating tangible returns through increased engagement, improved advertising performance and increased monetization. Meta is also pursuing new opportunities across personal superintelligence, consumer and business agents, enterprise products, and AI glasses.

The ‘at the market offering’ involves selling Meta’s new Class C Stock, which it announced last week it is creating. These Class C shares don’t have voting rights, so can be sold without diluting founder Mark Zuckerberg’s control of the company.

Internal forecasts last week showed that Meta needs to raise “hundreds of billions of dollars” over several years to fund its AI plans.

Key events

Anthropic files for stock market float

Newsflash: AI firm Anthropic has taken an important step towards floating on the New York Stock Exchange.

In the last few minutes, Anthropic filed publicly for an initial public offering, in which it declares that “AI is one of the most consequential technologies in human history”.

If managed well, Anthropic says, it could rapidly speed up scientific discovery, “greatly increase economic growth rates”, help cure major disease and solve other serious problems.

But alongside the potential of AI, Anthropic – which operates the Claude chatbot – also points to the risks – warning that AI can be used “for ill as well as good”.

The word risks appears more than 200 times in the IPO filing – and those risks include the danger that AI is used for cybercrime or to design biological weapons, misused by authoritarian states, or that humans could lose control of it, Anthropic says.

It’s not immediately cleat what value Anthropic is aiming for – the section showing how many shares it will sell, and at what price, is blank….

Lisa O’Carroll

Chinese online shopping giant Temu has agreed to take action to reduce the prospect of illegal goods being sold on its platform to comply with EU legislation.

It has now been given four months by the EU to prove it can remedy the breaches of the Digital Services Act.

Following a €200m fine in May, the website will launch a six month risk assessment of products along with an evaluation of the effectiveness of measures put in place to stop illegal products being sold on its platform.

The Chinese platform was warned it would face a series of rolling fines if it it did not do this.

Among the items the EU found on its website were baby dummies posing a choke hazard, clothing and jewellery with carcinogenic chemicals and electrical chargers failing basic safety tests.

SpaceX enters $4bn deal with Apollo for AI chips

Newsflash: We have another multi-billion dollar deal in the AI world.

SpaceX has reported that it has agreed to lease data centre hardware, including AI chips, from an entity managed by asset management firm Apollo Global Management.

The equipment will be leased for around five years, and used in data centres selected by SpaceX – which expects to pay roughly $40bn to Apollo under the deal.

The lease schedules are expected to commence during the first half of 2027 upon delivery of the GPUs, SpaceX says in an SEC filing.

Reminder: Elon Musk posted last night that SpaceX had “closed $40B of debt for GPUs”…

Oxford Street finally pedestrianised

Gwyn Topham

People take selfies as they walk along the traffic-free Oxford Street in London today Photograph: Neil Hall/EPA

On a wetter Monday morning than London’s mayor may have dreamed of, pedestrians walked freely through the temporary bollards onto a green welcome banner rolled along the tarmac, declaring Oxford Street traffic-free.

Sadiq Khan said it was a “momentous day”, with almost a kilometre of the capital’s most famous shopping street now pedestrianised, banishing the buses, bikes, taxis, e-scooters and pedicabs along with the private car.

After decades of discussion, the closure to traffic has come into effect in time for the busy Christmas shopping period, although the bigger transformation of the street, a £150m project including trees, seating and level “plazas” for events, will start taking shape from spring 2027.

Speaking on Monday morning in the John Lewis department store, Khan said he was proud to be “finally unlocking a new era”, noting that the first action plans to pedestrianise the street started in 1971 “when I was literally in nappies”.

The mayor, whose first jobs were in retail in stores in the street, said:

double quotation mark“This is a momentous day for Oxford Street and the capital. We want high quality shops that will atrract people here but also culture, hospitality, leisure, and people going to and from the office having a good experience and I’m confident we’ll get that.”

He added:

double quotation mark“We’ve seen over the last couple of decades this street in decline… Pedestrianising the street with great public transport links, more greenery, more seating, will link to a better experience all round.”

The permanent plans will depend on feedback in the first phase and testing, and Khan said London “would be closely monitoring these changes to make sure they are working for everyone”.

He added: “I want this to be a proof of concept – that investing in people rather than traffic leads to better footfall and spend.”

About half of the 1.2 mile street is now vehicle-free, roughly from Oxford Circus station to close to Marble Arch.

Many of London’s double-decker buses have traditionally run the length of the street and will now be diverted into neighbouring roads.

Claire Mann, chief operating officer at Transport for London, said there would still be “plenty of capacity for passengers” and it should not affect reliability. She said:

double quotation mark“People have said for some time it’s an unpleasanat environment to walk along, narrow and busy – the main movement through Oxford Street is pedestrians so this is us enabling people to make that journey in a nicer way. We’ll be monitoring to see if it does have an impact on ridership – but Bond Street and the Elizabeth Line does give you a way to arrive in style.”

Bollards prevent road users on Oxford Street in London today Photograph: Neil Hall/EPA

Wall Street likes the sound of Meta’s fundraising plan – the company’s shares are up 2% in pre-market trading.

Meta to raise $95bn to help fund AI plans

Boom! Meta has just announced plans to raise up to $95bn to help pay for its massive AI ambitions.

The company behind Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp is kicking off a new fundraising drive to fund “its core business and emerging AI opportunities”.

The fundraising comes in two parts.

First, Meta plans to raise $35bn through new “underwritten public offerings” – a sale of company stock.

Second, Meta also plans to launch a $60bn “at-the-market offering” – in which it will sell new common stock to investors at the going market rate in future.

The Silicon Valley giant says these plans will support “Meta’s continued investment in AI infrastructure and personal superintelligence”.

It also says it is “investing with financial discipline,” saying:

Internal forecasts last week showed that Meta needs to raise “hundreds of billions of dollars” over several years to fund its AI plans.

The downturn in UK retail sales has eased this month, new data shows.

The CBI reports that UK retail sales volumes contracted in the year to October at the slowest rate since April 2025.

A net balance of -10% retailers reported that sales dropped over the last year, better than the -55% recorded in September.

Martin Sartorius, lead economist at the CBI, says:

double quotation mark“The ongoing retail sales downturn eased in October, with volumes falling at their slowest annual pace in over a year. Wholesalers and motor traders also saw some signs of activity steadying over the same period. That said, the outlook remains fragile as businesses face headwinds from cautious household spending and higher fuel costs.

UK gilt yields dropping ahead of the budget

UK government borrowing costs are dropping this morning, a welcome sign ahead of Wednesday’s budget.

The yield (or interest rate) on 10 and 30-year UK gilts have both dropped by around three basis points (0.03 of a percentage point) this morning.

City investors are hoping that chancellor John Healey avoids rocking the boat when he delivers his first budget, prioritising rebuilding fiscal headroom – although the jump in bond yields in recent months will have eaten into that borrowing cushion.

There were reports last weekend that Healey will put billions of pounds into public financial institutions including the National Wealth Fund and the British Business Bank.

Fresh funding into these so-called “PuFins” could boost the UK’s AI, defence and green energy sectors.

Crucially for the chancellor, if a PuFin makes a loan or investment, the value of this financial asset is netted off against public liabilities, and the PSNFL measure of UK debt does not go up.

However, the City may be wary of any trickery to keep government debt off the books.

Andrew Wishart, UK economist at Berenberg, explains:

double quotation markIssuing loans to public financial institutions creates a financial asset that offsets the increase in outstanding government debt. If the investments that the PuFins make generate sufficient returns for the PuFins to repay their government loans, then long term debt sustainability is little affected.

Limited transparency and the risk that the PuFins may suffer impairments on their investments will probably make bond market investors skeptical of the extra gilt issuance. Chancellor Healey should avoid a big increase in gilt issuance to fund such intra-public sector lending.

Neocloud company shares drop after Musk warning

Shares in AI cloud computing companies are dropping in pre-market trading after Elon Musk warned they face “guppy-level death and consolidation”.

Coreweave are down 2.4% in pre-market. Nebius, another neocloud operator, are on track for a 2.1% drop when Wall Street opens, while Iren are down 1.9%.

Neil Wilson, Saxo UK investor strategist, says:

double quotation markNebius, CoreWeave and Iren were slammed in premarket trading on Monday after SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk said more than 200 neoclouds are “going to see guppy-level death and consolidation.”

That’s the guppy fish – prone to suddenly dying in household fisk tanks – not the GBPJPY FX cross...In a post on X Musk said “debt markets have almost entirely shut off access to money for any company that doesn’t have substantial revenue independent of AI data centers”.

Business sentiment in Germany has improved, as hopes build that its economic stagnation may be ending.

Economic research institute Ifo’s Business Climate Index has risen to 90.2 points in October, up from 89.9 points in September.

Ifo reports:

double quotation markThis was due to more optimistic expectations. Companies, however, assessed their current situation as slightly worse. The economic recovery is continuing.

Brazil's bonds fall after Lula wins election

Elsewhere in the bond markets, Brazil’s debt is dropping in value after president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won a dramatic victory over his far-right opponent, Flávio Bolsonaro, to claim a historic fourth term in power.

Bolsonaro, son of the former president, had been expected to oust Lula, but instead the left-wing incumbent triumphed, with 51.79% of the vote to his 45-year-old rival’s 48.21%.

Investors had anticipated that a Bolsonaro win would have led to a new push to rein in Brazil’s public debt, and may now be keen to sell Brazilian debt and the real.

Reuters reports that Brazil’s international bonds have dropped more than 1 cent after Lula’s election win.

Viktor Szabó, investment director for emerging market debt at Aberdeen Investments, explains why bond investors are nervous:

double quotation markLula’s campaign did pledge fiscal consolidation, but at a slower pace than his rival and with the explicit condition that spending cuts should not fall on lower-income Brazilians. The government’s own projections show the primary balance improving only gradually, to a surplus of 1.3% of GDP by 2030. His running mate, Geraldo Alckmin, pointed to campaign funding and excessive public-sector salaries as areas for savings. Neither comes close to the scale of the problem.

Brazil has little room left for this kind of politics. Gross public debt has climbed to around 83% of GDP, up more than 10 percentage points during this administration, and a deficit close to 10% of GDP is now almost entirely interest. Brazil pays one of the highest real interest rates in the world on a debt that keeps growing, which is the definition of an unsustainable path, and the bill falls on companies and households as much as on the Treasury.

Elon Musk’s warning that AI cloud funding could dry up is a reminder that companies may not provide the revenues that hyperscalers and neoclouds are relying on.

Steve Daheb, Head of AI GTM Strategy at enterprise software firm Flexera, explains:

double quotation mark“We have spent the past few years debating whether AI will replace people. But the more immediate question for many businesses is whether AI could end up costing more than the people and processes it replaces.

“Businesses need to remember every decision an AI makes and every action an agent takes has a price tag. The AI people see and the prompt they enter is only part of the story. AI doesn’t just answer questions: it reasons, retries, checks and refines its response, drawing on models, enterprises data and computing power just to complete a single task. That iterative process and response refinement are what drive AI costs. Once agents are embedded across applications and running tasks throughout a business, the metre is always running – yet many companies still have no idea how many tokens they are using or what a particular task will cost because of this AI cost domino effect.

“That is why we are seeing such whiplash. Businesses went from board-level mandates to use AI as quickly as possible to cancelling licences, imposing token limits and slamming the brakes on projects when the bills arrived.”

French bonds rally after Paris avoids Moody's downgrade

French government bonds are rallying this morning after Paris avoided being downgrade by rating agency Moody’s last Friday night.

The yield, or interest rate, on French 10-year bonds has dropped by 3.5 basis points to 4.98%, away from the 24-year high set last week.

Moody’s surprised investors late on Friday night by announcing it had maintained its rating of Aa3 with a negative outlook; the City had expected a cut.

Moody’s warned, though, that France’s debt position has worsened, explaining:

double quotation markSince our previous periodic review of the sovereign rating, slower growth and a higher deficit have pushed France’s debt burden somewhat higher than previously expected. In addition, government bond yields have risen more rapidly than we expected, while widespread social protests have erupted which could constrain fiscal consolidation efforts.

The Aa3 rating assumes that a deficit-reducing budget for 2027 will be adopted, while financing costs and social tensions will abate somewhat in the next few months.

France’s public debt soared to 119% of GDP this summer, the highest level since 1946. The proposed budget for 2027, which has yet to be approved, aims to cut France’s budget deficit from 5.4% to 5% through wage freezes and tax rises.

UK's Computacenter hikes profit forecasts thanks to AI demand

UK tech company Computacenter is benefitting from the AI boom.

This morning, Computacenter raised its financial outlook for this financial year, after “a very strong first half performance”.

Computercenter is winning business from the neoclouds – the AI cloud computing companies which Elon Musk reckons face ‘guppy-level death’.

It told the City:

double quotation markSourcing revenue continued to grow strongly, primarily driven by hyperscale and neocloud customers in North America and the UK.

Group Services revenue was also ahead of last year, as strong organic growth in Professional Services, also driven by North America, more than offset a decline in Managed Services revenue.

There’s such demand that Computercenter now has a ‘committed product order backlog’ of £12.6bn, up from £9.3bn at the end of June, and “a strong pipeline of opportunities in North America and the UK”.

It now expects adjusted profit before tax for FY 2026 to be at least £425m, ahead of forecasts of £387.1m.

Shares have jumped by 6.7% in early trading.

Musk also claimed on X overnight that some partly-built datacentres simply won’t be completed.

As he put it:

double quotation markI think we’re going to see a lot of stranded compute in partially complete datacenters

Bloomberg, intriguingly, are questioning Elon Musk’s claim that SpaceX has closed a $40bn debt deal to fund more chip purchases.

They’ve heard that talks over the pricing of this deal are still ongoing, and report:

double quotation markAs of late Sunday in New York, those conversations remained ongoing and the deal hadn’t priced, people with knowledge of the discussions said. The parties are still working on finalizing the debt package in the coming days, the people said.

Introduction: Musk says AI datacentre funding is drying up

Good morning, and welcome to our rolling coverage of business, the financial markets and the world economy.

The flow of funding which has helped the AI industry to grow rapidly could be running dry, at least for some firms in the cloud computing world, Elon Musk has warned.

The world’s richest person declared last night that at least 200 ‘neoclouds’ – companies which provide specialised cloud infrastructure to run AI workloads – could die or consolidate because they will struggle to access capital.

Musk made the claim while also declaring that his SpaceX business has closed a $40bn debt deal to pay for the chips it needs for its artificial intelligence work.

He posted on X that firms who rely on revenue streams from AI datacentres are being cold-shouldered by lenders, saying:

double quotation markAs 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.

SpaceX closed $40B of debt for GPUs, but we’re investment grade and have Starlink & launch revenue.

That means the 200+ neoclouds are going to see guppy-level death and consolidation. Some will make it through, but not many.

[Musk is referring to the guppy fish, the colourful freshwater aquarium fish notorious for suddenly dying in the aquarium, especially if there is a change in its environment.]

Neoclouds are specialist cloud providers that rent out clusters of high-speed Nvidia chips to firms looking to conduct AI training and inference.

They include CoreWeave, the US firm whose share price has fallen 60% in the last year as investors have questioned whether the huge investment in AI datacentres will be rewarded with lucrative cash flows.

The cost of insuring CoreWeave’s debt against default has climbed in recent weeks to levels that typically suggest credit distress – Musk’s comments are unlikely ease investors concerns!

The agenda

9am: IFO German business climate
11am: CBI distributive trends survey of UK retail