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, "
ares623 27 minutes ago [-]
AI will either steal retirement funds by making scams more realistic, or it will steal them by purchasing OpenAI's IPO.
asim 1 hours ago [-]
Tens of billions spent on AI data centers. But people still starve across the planet. Amazing.
wewewedxfgdf 40 minutes ago [-]
No doubt you have a nice bike or computer or you spend money on something often like movies or board games or something.
Do you argue that money should all go to feeding the hungry?
consp 32 minutes ago [-]
Poor argumentation. If I spend 25 billion on movies and still have enough money to never care you should ask me again.
ic_fly2 31 minutes ago [-]
What a dumb take.
krona 32 minutes ago [-]
Capital misallocation do be like that, but I don't think that capital would be feeding children in the Congo if it wasn't for Facebook's latest folly.
loeg 24 minutes ago [-]
The issue is mostly the corrupt elites that control these impoverished counties, not foreign aid or lack thereof.
9 minutes ago [-]
notmyjob 19 minutes ago [-]
If more capitalists were Christian it might. I mean there are capitalists and then there are capitalists.
kcaseg 1 hours ago [-]
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 lol
t0lo 1 hours ago [-]
Conditioning- America is a capitalist social experiment and I mean that literally
edm0nd 41 minutes ago [-]
Seems pretty successful then no for being such a young country. America is literally where all the major tech and internet companies are.
molteanu 29 minutes ago [-]
Where I'm pretty sure that the definition of "successful" that you have in mind is one given by America itself.
gherkinnn 23 minutes ago [-]
"Hub for all the major tech companies" isn't the only metric that matters, not in the face of its current administration. It so is not.
chii 41 minutes ago [-]
i think a good counter to this sort of argument is :
Michigan has plenty of water. But California still has droughts sometimes. Amazing (if you're 14).
ivape 55 minutes ago [-]
Technological innovation veils our failed morality. I don’t ever see this resolving without God literally showing up to Earth.
CamperBob2 48 minutes ago [-]
And there you are with your fancy computer! Sell it and feed the poor.
steve_adams_86 41 minutes ago [-]
Their fancy computer's value is a mote compared to the billions of dollars being poured into AI software and infrastructure. It's a dead horse that shouldn't be beaten anymore. Individual choices are so insignificant as to be effectively meaningless in contexts like this.
anon291 42 minutes ago [-]
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.
bombcar 39 minutes ago [-]
This is seen in that starvation is effectively solved in the USa (and now runs the other direction; the poor in the US often tend toward obesity instead of starvation).
The “solution” to countries with starvation today is likely massive full-scale invasion and domination; something the modern world doesn’t have an appetite for.
gherkinnn 18 minutes ago [-]
Sure. As if the massive full-scale invasion and domination of Iraq and Afghanistan worked so well. And throwing in more firepower and loosening the rules of engagement won't fix it either.
It boggles the mind how anybody over the age of 20 can think this way.
phil21 2 minutes ago [-]
The primary reason the invasion of Afghanistan failed was because the US tried to pretend it wasn’t an invasion or domination. Telling the local warlords and factions beforehand they just had to outlast things was a plan doomed to failure before it even began.
If the government had sold “we are making this place the 51st state and it will take 100 years to make that happen” there would be an entirely different outcome.
I’m not saying that’s what should have happened. I actually feel nothing should have happened. But if you are going to take extensive lethal action like that, at least man up and be honest over what it will take to be successful.
The US populace is bizarrely afraid of admitting they live the amazing lives they do due to empire. It’s politically untenable to actually state the reality of what it takes to subjugate a population, no matter if the death numbers are similar for abject pointless failure versus eventual success.
anon291 35 minutes ago [-]
Yeah America has no ability to colonize other countries. We are not unified enough as a culture to do that. Look at the debacle of Afghanistan.
Like right now there is starvation in Nigeria because Islamofascists from the north are hunting Christians in the south. Exactly how will any amount of American money convince religious zealots to stop being zealots? If anything, a large influx of money from infidels will just make the clerics claim that their victims are foreign operatives. There is nothing we can do other than pray or stage a full scale military invasion. At that point we can either choose to fully administer the place (unsustainable) or we would have to destroy the apparatus that made the situation possible, which is going to look a helluva lot like a genocide. An impossible situation and only one of many across the globe.
JonathanBeuys 25 minutes ago [-]
I have not looked into Meta, but when I look at the growth of Alphabet's cloud revenue, it looks pretty solid:
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.
ares623 22 minutes ago [-]
That's literally just a line go up graph with no details whatsoever? Also, "According to Perplexity" why is it not "according to Alphabet"?
JonathanBeuys 16 minutes ago [-]
Which additional details would you like to see?
According to Perplexity because instead of going through 20 earnings reports myself, I outsourced the task to Perplexity and then manually checked a few of the numbers to be reasonably sure they were correct.
ares623 9 minutes ago [-]
Oh, gotcha. I thought it was Perplexity themselves reporting about Google's earnings or something.
Like how much of it is actually the "AI" part of the business for a start?
oskarkk 14 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
JonathanBeuys 5 minutes ago [-]
Do I understand your logic correctly that after 14 years of 30% growth another year is extremely unlikely and after 14.99 years it is almost impossible?
My logic is that we only have to take the next 10 years into account when calculating the probability.
And lots of things grew 30% or more for 10 years.
Bitcoin's market cap grew over 70% pa for 10 over years now.
Amazon's revenue grew over 60% pa for over 10 years in their early days.
I can think of many numbers, but would have to check: global solar installations, smartphone usage are examples that come to mind.
anilgulecha 6 minutes ago [-]
Cloud spend overall has - CAGR of 30-35% from 2007 to 2025.
LarsDu88 38 minutes ago [-]
I think Zuckerberg understands something that most people on this forum seem to not understand at all.
Facebook, Instagram, etc... these are all only valuable as network effect monopolies.
Investment into AI can torch billions of dollars and still be worthwhile so long as it's done in the service of protecting those monopolies, because LLMs are both intrinsically threatening to Meta's existence and intriniscally valuable for building better recommender systems when platform monopolists like Apple add privacy protections (cutting Meta off from the data spigot that powers its revenue streams).
Once AIs with no wallets outnumber humans on Facebook, Meta has an existential problem. There is no way to avoid the inevitable, the best one can do is embrace it, and 25 billion is nothing compared to losing your platform.
ares623 36 minutes ago [-]
Or, the guy who cheats at Catan just needs the constant ego boost to be able to say "yeah I'm kind of a big deal in Next Big Thing"
diamond559 29 minutes ago [-]
So, burn tens of billions to infest your own site w/ bots bc it is somehow "inevitable" anyway? Why not spend that to try and make the user experience better for users with wallets? The investors are clearly fed up w/ burning cash and racking up debt w/ no profits to show for it.
Cloud and AI infra already pull in $300B+ a year. Data center vacancy under 1% and they’re power utility constrained. The fiber guys built ahead of demand, these guys are printing money and can’t build new printers fast enough.
hagbarth 1 hours ago [-]
But Meta specifically needs returns from AI products to justify the capex. Google and Microsoft eg. have profitable cloud businesses from where they can rent out GPU compute. Meta’s bet is far more risky.
baxtr 26 minutes ago [-]
True. But then again they own the consumer side.
If Meta hadn’t invested in AI recommendations a while back they would have lost against TikTok big time.
ic_fly2 28 minutes ago [-]
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.
emilsedgh 1 hours ago [-]
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?
daniel_iversen 52 minutes ago [-]
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.
diamond559 26 minutes ago [-]
The investors don't seem to agree, it seems to be sinking rn... Ads? They already sell ads, is their "AI" algorithm better than the current one developed over years by some of the smartest phds on the planet? I very much doubt that.
utopiah 45 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
kcaseg 1 hours ago [-]
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!
whatsupdog 1 hours ago [-]
Kek. (Before you downvote me for low effort comment, that's the entirety of my argument.)
If Meta manages to die in the coming AI apocalypse it will make me extremely happy. They are an absolute cancer on society.
zkmon 2 hours ago [-]
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.
ares623 1 hours ago [-]
Not even a cloud platform to keep it going indefinitely. At least IBM had enterprise customers.
edm0nd 38 minutes ago [-]
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.
apples_oranges 2 hours ago [-]
But I just use Instagram to look at photography content. Am I helping to destroy society?
bzzzt 1 hours ago [-]
Every click you send to Meta is used to build your personal profile to generate ad revenue. So yes, you’re helping them in a very small way…
Waterluvian 1 hours ago [-]
I think everyone has a right to opt out of politics. Nobody should have to pay attention or have opinions or be an activist. But that doesn’t mean their actions aren’t affecting the politics, nor does it make them immune from being judged.
ares623 1 hours ago [-]
Unironically yes? A very small amount, sure. But every eyeball counts.
DecentShoes 1 hours ago [-]
How on earth are you still getting Instagram to serve you photos and not month old tiktok videos? I haven't seen a photo in Instagram in years.
DataDaemon 33 minutes ago [-]
How is going metaverse?
Rendered at 07:45:33 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
"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, "
Do you argue that money should all go to feeding the hungry?
https://launiusr.wordpress.com/2012/02/08/why-explore-space-...
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.
The “solution” to countries with starvation today is likely massive full-scale invasion and domination; something the modern world doesn’t have an appetite for.
It boggles the mind how anybody over the age of 20 can think this way.
If the government had sold “we are making this place the 51st state and it will take 100 years to make that happen” there would be an entirely different outcome.
I’m not saying that’s what should have happened. I actually feel nothing should have happened. But if you are going to take extensive lethal action like that, at least man up and be honest over what it will take to be successful.
The US populace is bizarrely afraid of admitting they live the amazing lives they do due to empire. It’s politically untenable to actually state the reality of what it takes to subjugate a population, no matter if the death numbers are similar for abject pointless failure versus eventual success.
Like right now there is starvation in Nigeria because Islamofascists from the north are hunting Christians in the south. Exactly how will any amount of American money convince religious zealots to stop being zealots? If anything, a large influx of money from infidels will just make the clerics claim that their victims are foreign operatives. There is nothing we can do other than pray or stage a full scale military invasion. At that point we can either choose to fully administer the place (unsustainable) or we would have to destroy the apparatus that made the situation possible, which is going to look a helluva lot like a genocide. An impossible situation and only one of many across the globe.
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.
According to Perplexity because instead of going through 20 earnings reports myself, I outsourced the task to Perplexity and then manually checked a few of the numbers to be reasonably sure they were correct.
Like how much of it is actually the "AI" part of the business for a start?
That's a big "if", usually things don't grow at 30% per year for 15 years.
My logic is that we only have to take the next 10 years into account when calculating the probability.
And lots of things grew 30% or more for 10 years.
Bitcoin's market cap grew over 70% pa for 10 over years now.
Amazon's revenue grew over 60% pa for over 10 years in their early days.
I can think of many numbers, but would have to check: global solar installations, smartphone usage are examples that come to mind.
Facebook, Instagram, etc... these are all only valuable as network effect monopolies.
Investment into AI can torch billions of dollars and still be worthwhile so long as it's done in the service of protecting those monopolies, because LLMs are both intrinsically threatening to Meta's existence and intriniscally valuable for building better recommender systems when platform monopolists like Apple add privacy protections (cutting Meta off from the data spigot that powers its revenue streams).
Once AIs with no wallets outnumber humans on Facebook, Meta has an existential problem. There is no way to avoid the inevitable, the best one can do is embrace it, and 25 billion is nothing compared to losing your platform.
Fiber dailed because the telcos overbuilt and demand lagged. When Amazon introduced AWS it succeeded right away because there was lots of demand.
Jeff Bezos Ted Talk 2003 - https://youtu.be/vMKNUylmanQ
If Meta hadn’t invested in AI recommendations a while back they would have lost against TikTok big time.
Together with the debt payments needed then, this will do wonders for the stock. I’m sure.
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?
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.
Why is Oracle going into debt for AI? What are they doing
I'm sure other corpos would snatch up all their properties like Threads and IG but still it would be a net positive.