Key points
- Oracle, Alphabet, Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft all trail the S&P 500 this year
- Oracle stock is down 55.5% since its $18 billion bond sale
- Alphabet sold $12.4 billion of new shares last quarter
The five Big Tech companies on our AI debt tracker that sold bonds this year have all trailed the S&P 500 in 2026. Through the Oct. 29 close, Oracle (ORCL) was down 28.4%, Alphabet (GOOGL) was down 9.3%, and Meta Platforms (META) was down 5.4%. Amazon (AMZN) and Microsoft (MSFT) were up 5.6% and 9.6%, respectively, while the index gained 12.8%.
I wanted to see how the stocks had performed while those companies kept borrowing. So I looked at their 13 US-dollar bond sales on the tracker since January 2025 and compared each stock's closing price the day before the sale with its Oct. 29 close. Nine of the 13 comparisons showed a decline; seven showed a drop of more than 5%.
Those aren't 13 independent company results. Alphabet appears four times, and Amazon and Oracle appear three times each. The comparisons also don't establish that the bond sales caused the declines.
| Bond sale | Size | Close the day before | Change to Oct. 29 close |
|---|---|---|---|
| Oracle, Sept. 24, 2025 | $18 billion | $313.83 | -55.5% |
| Alphabet, Aug. 6, 2026 | $25 billion | $362.43 | -21.7% |
| Meta, Oct. 30, 2025 | $30 billion | $751.67 | -16.9% |
| Oracle, Feb. 2, 2026 | $25 billion | $164.58 | -15.2% |
| Oracle, Jan. 30, 2025 | $7.75 billion | $162.02 | -13.9% |
| Alphabet, Feb. 9, 2026 | $20 billion | $322.86 | -12.1% |
| Meta, April 30, 2026 | $25 billion | $669.12 | -6.7% |
| Amazon, July 7, 2026 | $25 billion | $244.16 | -0.2% |
| Microsoft, Oct. 29, 2026 | $25 billion | $531.01 | -0.2% |
| Alphabet, Nov. 3, 2025 | $17.5 billion | $281.19 | +0.9% |
| Amazon, Nov. 17, 2025 | $15 billion | $234.69 | +3.9% |
| Amazon, March 10, 2026 | $37 billion | $213.49 | +14.2% |
| Alphabet, April 28, 2025 | $5 billion | $161.96 | +75.2% |
Meta priced both of its deals the day after reporting earnings, on Oct. 29, 2025, and April 29, 2026. The stock fell 11.3% and 8.6% on the sale days. Microsoft priced its $25 billion deal the day after its Oct. 28 report. So the sale dates and the earnings reactions overlap. What the table does show is how the stocks did while the debt kept piling up. The borrowing itself is still cheap for the strongest names. Microsoft's fixed-rate notes paid just 25 to 105 basis points over Treasuries.
Oracle's shareholders have lost the most
Oracle sold $18 billion of bonds on Sept. 24, 2025, two weeks after its stock hit a record close of $328.33. The shares had fallen 55.5% from the day before that sale through the Oct. 29 close. They jumped 10.7% on Oct. 28 after Oracle capped its new fundraising at $20 billion through fiscal 2030, then gave some of it back. On Oct. 30, Oracle closed 58.4% below its close the day before the bond sale.
Oracle's shareholders are paying in another way, too. The company finished selling $20 billion of new stock in the quarter that ended Aug. 31, and it expects half of the next $20 billion to come from stock as well. New shares spread the company's future profits across more owners.
Alphabet's newest shareholders are underwater
Alphabet has been selling stock, too. In the July-to-September quarter, it sold 12 million new Class A shares for $4.3 billion and 24 million Class C shares for $8.1 billion through an at-the-market program, which sells new stock gradually at market prices. It bought back no stock, after spending $11.5 billion on buybacks in the same quarter last year.
Neither share class traded below $314.89 during that quarter. Alphabet's Class A stock closed at $283.82 on Oct. 29, after falling 12.6% that day when search revenue missed estimates again. By our calculations, that's 9.9% below the lowest price either class traded at while Alphabet was selling.
Buyers in Meta's offering are doing better so far. Meta priced an offering of 40 million shares at $625 on Oct. 26 through forward agreements. The banks sold borrowed shares to investors, and Meta can issue new shares to settle the agreements by Nov. 19, 2027. The stock closed at $614.99 on Oct. 30, 1.6% below the offering price and 20.9% below its 2026 closing high of $777.59 on Sept. 24.
Intel shows the other side of the AI bill
Intel (INTC) isn't on our tracker as an AI borrower, but its holders took the biggest one-day hit of the group this week. Intel forecast fourth-quarter revenue of $15 billion to $16 billion on Oct. 29, below the $17.07 billion analysts expected. It blamed a PC slowdown on higher memory prices, part of a shortage that CEO Lip-Bu Tan said is driven by demand for AI.
Intel closed at $65.76 on Oct. 30, down 28.6% from its $92.07 close on Oct. 29. It's still up about 78% for the year, because it started 2026 at $36.90. Anyone who bought at the June 22 closing high of $140.94 is down 53.3%.
Put that together, and for shareholders, the AI bill is showing up as earnings pressure and dilution and, in Intel's case, higher memory costs. Meta's own filing said its forecasts show a need to raise "hundreds of billions of dollars over a period of several years beginning as early as fall 2026," and it plans a program to sell up to $60 billion of nonvoting Class C shares starting in early 2027. I'd watch those share sales more closely than the next bond deal.
Closing prices are from Yahoo Finance daily data. Bond sale dates and sizes come from our AI debt tracker.
