Meta Platforms launched a roughly $35 billion fundraising push on Monday, selling $22.5 billion in Class A common stock through forward sale agreements alongside about $12.5 billion in a newly created Mandatory Convertible Preferred Stock, according to a filing Meta made with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The move makes Meta the latest tech giant to go hat-in-hand to Wall Street to pay for the eye-watering cost of building out artificial intelligence infrastructure.

The preferred offering consists of 250 million depositary shares, each representing a 1/20th interest in a share of the new Series A preferred stock, with underwriters holding an option to sell 37.5 million more. Each full preferred share carries a $1,000 liquidation preference and is expected to convert to common stock around August 15, 2029. Meta plans to list the depositary shares on Nasdaq under the ticker "METAM." The common stock piece, meanwhile, is structured as forward sale agreements with Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, with settlement due by November 19, 2027, and an underwriter option that could add another $3.375 billion.

Chipmakers Want In

In an unusual wrinkle, Nvidia, AMD and Broadcom have all indicated interest in buying up to a combined $5 billion of the common stock offering, though the filing stresses those indications are non-binding. Meta also disclosed plans for a separate at-the-market program that could eventually sell up to $60 billion of Class C stock, though no underwriting agreement for that program is yet in place.

Meta says proceeds from the preferred shares will go toward "general corporate purposes," and it doesn't expect to receive cash from the common stock piece until the forward sale agreements are settled down the road. In plain terms: the company is locking in financing now for AI spending that's already well underway.

THE BIGGEST TECH NAMES ARE ALL SUDDENLY RAISING CASH THE SAME WAY — SELLING STOCK TO BUILD THE DATA CENTERS AI NEEDS

Meta isn't alone. The move follows Alphabet's roughly $85 billion equity raise in June, itself billed as the largest corporate equity offering in history, which included a $10 billion private placement with Berkshire Hathaway. Alphabet's 2026 capital spending guidance alone runs between $180 billion and $190 billion, almost all of it aimed at AI compute and data centers — and Meta's capital needs are widely seen as running on a similar scale.

Wall Street's reaction to these mega-raises has been mixed. Alphabet shares dipped roughly 2% in after-hours trading the day its upsized offering was announced, as investors weighed the dilution against the AI growth story. Meta has not yet disclosed final pricing terms for Monday's offering; the dividend rate and conversion terms on the preferred stock will be set when the deal prices.

For now, the offering is one more data point in a 2026 storyline that keeps repeating: the companies racing hardest to build AI infrastructure are also the ones burning cash fastest, and increasingly turning to public investors — not just their own balance sheets — to keep the buildout going.