Amazon (AMZN) stock fell on Monday after the e-commerce giant began issuing its first U.S. dollar bond in three years. Amazon plans to raise $15 billion in a funding round to fund AI and new infrastructure efforts. In response to questions, Amazon said in an email that the partnership will “support business investments, fund future capital expenditures, and repay future debt maturities.”
Proceeds from the deal, which was $3 billion more than originally expected, will be used for everything from acquisitions and capital spending to stock buybacks, people close to the funding venture said. Amazon is not the first major U.S. company to sell such bonds this year. Google’s parent company Alphabet sold $25 billion in debt in the U.S. and Europe earlier this month. Meta Platforms last month issued $30 billion in corporate debt, the largest of the year, and Oracle (ORCL) also raised $18 billion in high-grade debt in September.
Amazon sells the investment-grade bonds in up to six parts, according to a source close to the sale. Negotiations to set the price of the 40-year bond, the longest part of the agreement, have become tense, with the price rising from an initial 1.15 percentage points to 0.85 percentage points above U.S. Treasuries, people familiar with the matter said.
Investor hype for AMZN has soared after earnings earlier this month showed Amazon Web Services posting its fastest quarterly growth since 2022, followed by a $38 billion cloud deal with OpenAI. Despite today’s decline, AMZN is still up 9% over the past 30 days.