Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- > Oracle sold $18bn of bonds in September.
Why is Oracle going into debt for AI? What are they doing
by dmix - Pumping the stonk one last time.by diamond559
- Building data centers for OpenAI, but it requires a lot of upfront capital.
- financing huge deals for use of OCI https://finance.yahoo.com/news/oracle-corp-orcl-q4-2025-0701.... See Q4 FY25
> Total Cloud Revenue (SaaS + IaaS): $6.7 billion, up 27%. CapEx (Full Year): $21.2 billion. The company is facing supply constraints, unable to meet the high demand for its cloud services, leading to scheduling customers into the future.
Much lower name recognition for smaller customers. But there are some big big name "AI" & B2C companies who have _huge_ spend with OCI. This isnt "rent a couple of instances" its much more like "provide a couple GW of compute for X years."
by donavanm - If Meta manages to die in the coming AI apocalypse it will make me extremely happy. They are an absolute cancer on society.by mdhb
- But I just use Instagram to look at photography content. Am I helping to destroy society?
- I honestly think the world would be better without Meta if it did die.
I'm sure other corpos would snatch up all their properties like Threads and IG but still it would be a net positive.
by edm0nd - It used to have some survival instincts. It was gobbling young companies such as whatapp and insta to keep itself alive. But with metaverse they lost the plot and now desperate to cling on to AI wave. Yep, this dino is gone.by zkmon
- Waiting for the lack of returns on LLM investments to come and bite back.
Together with the debt payments needed then, this will do wonders for the stock. I’m sure.
by ic_fly2 - Ok, Metaverse and AI didn’t work out. But maybe betting billions on the Next Big Thing, while your actual product is descending into anarchy will pay off!by kcaseg
- Think of your 401k getting wiped out, they will let your 401k pay for these data centers. Think about it, these bonds have a 40-year lifespan.
"The social media group had hired Citigroup and Morgan Stanley to raise up to $25bn in debt, ranging from five to 40 years in maturity, "
by andro_dev - AI will either steal retirement funds by making scams more realistic, or it will steal them by purchasing OpenAI's IPO.by ares623
- I have not looked into Meta, but when I look at the growth of Alphabet's cloud revenue, it looks pretty solid:
https://x.com/JonathanBeuys/status/1984882268817519036
That is revenue from real world usage of their datacenters. Usage their customers would not pay for if it did not have a positive ROI.
A pretty stable growth of 30% per year for the last 5 years. At a current level of about $50B per year.
What is the value of it, if it continues like this for another decade? Revenue would be at roughly $1T/year then.
In the face of this real usage and the growth of it, spending tens of billions of dollars on building out infrastructure looks ok to me.
- > Usage their customers would not pay for if it did not have a positive ROI.
I don't think we can assume that's true. Their customers are paying for it, but we don't know how profitable they are being with the AI compute they pay for.
by logankeenan - > What is the value of it, if it continues like this for another decade? Revenue would be at roughly $1T/year then.
That's a big "if", usually things don't grow at 30% per year for 15 years.
by oskarkk - That's literally just a line go up graph with no details whatsoever? Also, "According to Perplexity" why is it not "according to Alphabet"?by ares623
- What was their vision for AI to begin with?
I totally understand what OpenAI and Google are trying to do with AI but I never understood Meta's angle.
What's Meta's AI product?
by emilsedgh - It seems like the next straw he is grasping after the Metaverse embarrassment.by solumunus
- Many, but one often overlooked is experiences of a pornographic or erotic character.
This is one of the most important future uses of what we today call chat bots and "AI".
by cess11 - Meta's goal is to stop OpenAI, Google and/or Anthropic from shutting them out of whatever AI ends up delivering. This is why they went with open weights for LLama - it prevents the other players becoming gatekeepers.
This is part of a pattern of tech leaders investing in order to avoid getting shut-out of whatever the next paradigm of computing is supposed to be.
- Google building Google+ and stuffing social into everything to avoid getting shut out of social networking. (The fear Larry/Sergey felt about this is why Vic Gundotra could bully and survive scandals until it became clear that Facebook wasn't an existential threat/Google+ was not going to really compete)
- Meta attempting to build an AI assistant because they were afraid Alexa/Google Assistant/Siri would be how everyone accessed computers in the future (due to technical failure, this product only ever launched as control mechanism for Oculus, but the ambition was larger)
Of course this always come alongside other factors that lead others to follow when a new concept is proven; however a tell-tale sign that leadership is worried about market dominance rather than a mere new line of business is that they spend or throw weight around above and beyond what the new line of business alone would justify.
by advisedwang - What is NOT their angle; ads, UGC, entertainment experience (algo etc), Metaverse and gaming, communication (WhatsApp, insta etc) and I’m sure they’ll take advantage anything that’s close to their core areas of interest or anything else big. AI is definitely the tide that lifts all boats but if you’re one of the top 5 tech companies in the world then the prize is incredibly large and not yet known.
- > What's Meta's AI product?
They have several actually, from computer vision in glasses (RayBan or Quest) to Speech To Text to get commands on such glasses, to "improved" translation via LLMs, to just chat bots in most of their chat solutions. They do integrate into products, it's not just research.
Is it good? No idea as I don't use them but I believe their angle is literally what Zuckerberg said publicly, roughly "Can't miss AI if it's real! Have to be first." which isn't exactly a very deep strategy but they have deep pockets.
by utopiah - Matt Levine's take on this: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2025-10-29/put...by asterix99
- >Zuck... “the right strategy to aggressively frontload building capacity” as part of the tech group’s bid to be the first to build artificial superintelligence.
There's one problem. They seem unlikely to be first to build ASI given that Google and OpenAI seem a fair bit ahead and there's stiff competition from xAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek et al.
The leaderboard seems to have Google, OpenAI and Antropic ahead, then X and four Chinese firms, Z, DeepSeek, GLM and Kimi, with Meta behind that.
I'm not sure if they have a decent strategy to get ahead? It seems to me the best bet would be to have some very smart people do a better algorithm rather than building more data centers.
by tim333 - A better strategy would be to just focus and expand on what they do well while their competitors burn money with potentially no decent outcome.by solumunus
- Tens of billions spent on AI data centers. But people still starve across the planet. Amazing.by asim
- People in other countries starve because the people in charge of them are evil not because the people with resources lack benevolence. If you've ever tried to do charity in a foreign country with a foreign culture and language you would be aware of the issues. No amount of outside money in the world could fix these problems. In fact they will make it worse. People need to grow up.
In the United States, starvation doesn't exist so we've expanded the definition to include more people because we really care to feed people. If you've been to countries where actual starvation is a possibility, you'd understand. So tired of this self hating unaware self flagellation.
by anon291 - i think a good counter to this sort of argument is :
https://launiusr.wordpress.com/2012/02/08/why-explore-space-...
by chii - Last time I commented something very similar thinking it was the least controversial no brainer thing and multiple people reacted as if it was some Leninist ragebait lolby kcaseg
- Population numbers in all areas where this is widespread exploded after the introduction of efficient agriculture from outside. Like if lack of food was the root problem, we would expect population in these places to be decreasing, not increasing, right? Something other than food scarcity is at play here.by pfannkuchen