US IG Wrap — Meta $30bn bond boosts volumes in biggest week of the year

William Hoffman

1 November 2025•5 min read

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Meta captured the market’s attention this week by pricing the largest investment grade bond deal of the year.

A record setting $125bn order book allowed the Facebook and Instagram owner to upsize the deal by $5bn to $30bn (check out all the details here).

Not only did that surpass confectionary company Mars Inc.’s $26bn bond package from March for the largest deal of the year, but it also cemented itself among the largest IG deals of all time. Meta’s deal is now tied with pharmaceutical company AbbVie’s $30bn deal from 2019 as the fifth largest USD bond package of all time, according to 9fin data.

Despite no deal announcements on Wednesday as the market waited to hear from the Fed, it was still the most active week of the year so far with $77.3bn of supply, according to 9fin data. That just barely surpassed the $75.2bn of bonds priced in the first week of March when Mars issued its deal.

Meta’s deal itself was well received but it also set off conversation in the IG bond market about just how much more debt could hit the market if all the hyperscalers look to issue in this kind of size.

“I think the credit market may be waking up a little bit just to how much capex we're gonna get,” one portfolio manager said. “There's appetite for it, but it's a really big number.”

There’s another $38bn Oracle deal in the works that would fund its build out of Vantage Data Center facilities in Texas and Wisconsin. That deal is likely to sit with private investors and banks as a kind of project and commercial real estate financing, but some bond investors still suspect banks may look to syndicate a portion of it out to public markets or there will be opportunities to buy it in the secondary market.

That deal may be the driver behind an expected $130bn of supply in November, according to BofA, which made that prediction before the Meta deal was pulled forward into October. The previous November supply record was $128bn in 2012, and multiple sources said they see a strong forward pipeline that could surpass the prior record.

“November is going to be extraordinarily busy,” one banker said. “There's still some M&A deals that likely will get funded in November or early December, so we're not done yet, and we've only got probably five weeks of real good issuance windows left.”

The non-Meta corporate deals

On Monday, high-performance wire and cable provider Amphenol priced a $7.5bn seven tranche deal in its biggest bond deal ever.

While not an AI hyperscaler in the vein of the tech behemoths, Amphenol is an example of some of the tertiary AI-adjacent companies that will also fuel a rise IG bond issuance in the years to come.

Amphenol used proceeds to repay commercial paper tied to its $10.5bn purchase of CommScope’s Connectivity and Cable Solutions Business as well as a $1bn acquisition of Trexon. The sale will create a new fiber optic cable provider that can compete in the growing ISP, broadband and data center space.

“They're in the market relatively frequently, but the size was definitely tied to that acquisition,” one sell side analyst said. “It’s a kind of AI-adjacent businesses, where they do electrical connectors and fiber optics for big data centers.”

Elsewhere in the AI space, Foundry JV — a joint venture formed by Brookfield and Intel — also came to market with a $1.79bn nine-part tap of its existing notes. As we wrote earlier this week, the deal will help push out some near term maturities giving Intel a longer runway to get its cashflows in order.

But not everything was tied to AI. French pharmaceutical company Sanofi SA returned to the dollar market after a seven-year hiatus to price a $2.6bn four-part bond package. Some investors who spoke to 9fin said they worried about liquidity with such an infrequent issuer, but bankers close to the deal said the company has US funding needs that could mean more frequent appearances in the future.

Southwest Airlines also flew into the market for its first trade since 2020. The $1.5bn dual-tranche offering took advantage of the scarcity of IG-rated airline paper to drive up demand. Check out all the details on that deal here.

UK and EU bank invasion

Following the regular post-earnings cadence of supply, Yankee banks came out of the woodwork to price $15bn across five issuers.

UK bank Lloyds priced one of its biggest bond packages in over a decade across dollars and sterling that priced a record tights. Likewise, NatWest, HSBC, Santander and DNB Bank all flew across the pond to issue in dollars.

Others such as M&T Bank issued perpetual notes as the market continues to crave higher yield products, and RBC took advantage of these historically tight spreads to issue a multi-part deal.

Given that most banks front load most of their supply, these deals were largely seen as opportunistically pulling forward some supply the banks are looking to get done in 2026.

Bankers said the strategy makes since with spreads as tights as they are and a slew of potential risk off macro events still ahead between now and the first quarter of next year.