Meta has launched two share offerings worth about $35bn to help pay for its rising AI spending. The larger, $22.5bn of Class A stock, uses forward sale agreements under which Meta delivers the shares now and receives the money later, by November 19, 2027 at the latest.
iMerit, a data annotation and AI training company acquired by ExlService in July, has launched iMerit Scholars. The platform helps AI developers recruit and manage specialists who evaluate, fine-tune and validate models for demanding enterprise uses.
Shares in neocloud providers fell after Elon Musk said more than 200 of them face 'guppy-level death'. Investors were already questioning their debt-fuelled expansion and whether the AI infrastructure build-out will pay off over time.
Goldman Sachs is investing $500M in the next phase of its 10,000 Small Businesses programme, including a new AI institute built with Anthropic, Google, Meta and OpenAI. At the launch, chief executive David Solomon said very little actually requires the frontier models those partners build.
Debt issued by AI infrastructure providers and neoclouds is losing investors' confidence. They doubt future revenue from the technology can pay back such enormous spending.
After a strong quarter for new phone customers, Verizon raised its 2026 forecasts and signed a deal worth more than $2bn with Amazon Web Services for AI workloads. Verizon will supply high-capacity network links and help add distributed computing capacity across many sites.