Big Tech hunts for cash to pay for its AI spend

Meta and Google are in a very “who wants to give us more money?” era. Both companies announced new methods of fundraising and monetization yesterday in an effort to foot the ever-growing bill for their AI spending plans.Google will sell more stock:Parent company Alphabet increased its recently announced stock sale from $80 billion worth of shares to nearly $85 billion.Even at the original amount, this was already set to be the world’s largest equity raise ever.Meta will sell an AI agent to businesses for the first time:The bot is designed to chat with customers via WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram. Eventually, it’s also intended for higher-level tasks, like market research and product insights, Meta said.It’ll be included with a subscription to one of Meta One’s business-focused tiers. Big businesses that use Meta’s WhatsApp Business Platform will be charged for the new AI agent on a usage basis.Zoom out: Big Tech is sparing no expense to build out AI infrastructure. In April, both Google and Meta raised their capital expenditure forecasts for the year—Google from top levels of $185 billion to $190 billion, and Meta from top levels of $135 billion to $145 billion. But in spite of Big Tech’s gargantuan AI capex, data center construction is currently behind schedule, the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday.—ML