FINANCING STRATEGY

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As evidenced by the hundreds of billions being spent this year on data center buildouts, hyperscalers are moving fast to bring massive amounts of computing power to bear on running AI.

Don’t just take our word for it, either.

“From our perspective, it’s strategically incredibly important that we secure access to this [compute] capacity as quickly as possible and in as large a quantity as we can get,” Michael Hart, director of corporate finance at Meta, told attendees at the 2026 Berkeley Forum on Corporate Governance on Oct. 14. “And so, that’s what is driving both a lot of the things we’re doing on the corporate balance sheet as well as some of the partnerships that we’ve struck with investment firms.”

It’s all hands on deck for finance teams at Meta, AI frontier model developers, and their partners to find the capital needed to fund these data center buildouts. The modern data centers needed to power AI technology aren’t like the data centers of old, according to Mona Dajani, another panelist who’s a partner at law firm Cooley and co-chair of its infrastructure, energy, and real estate practice. Before, data centers were “basically a real-estate transaction.” A modern data center development “integrat[es] real estate, energy…and then technology together.”

Sharing the load. Financing strategies range from corporate bond issuance to complex joint ventures, according to Hart and other experts who spoke during a panel session on digital infrastructure.

Structured as joint ventures between stakeholders, Dajani said, data center financing can include the developers, utility companies, and chip manufacturers. “It’s become much more integrated, much faster, [and] more at stake.”

Meta’s plan for multiple trips to the market.—AZ

      

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BUSINESS MODELS

Robert O'Hare

Robert O’Hare has spent more than 20 years working in finance, including positions at Square and Pandora. For much of the last decade, he’s been a CFO. He joined publicly held Affirm as SVP of finance in 2020 and stepped up to the CFO role almost two years ago.

A buy-now-pay-later company, Affirm is part of a wave of fintechs once thought to be challengers to traditional banks that are trying to elbow their way into some traditional banking territories. They’re not all trying to be the same flavor of financial services firm, however; the fintechs seeking banking-hood are doing so for varied reasons. Earlier this year, Coinbase, for example, got conditional approval from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency for a national trust charter for its digital asset custody business, and in 2025, the state of Georgia granted Stripe a specialized payment-services license. In September, Chime, one of the more well-known fintechs, announced an agreement to buy Oklahoma’s Stride Bank, founded in 1913.

In January, Affirm applied to regulators to establish Affirm Bank, a Nevada-based industrial loan company. We asked O’Hare a simple question: Why does Affirm want to be a bank?

Won’t being a bank make you more regulated?

We’re pursuing an industrial loan company charter, and it will allow us to gather deposits and use those deposits to fund our business. That is really what’s interesting about being a bank. It’s important to remember that we’re creating a bank subsidiary. Affirm itself would not become a bank holding company, and we’re not pursuing that path. We’re looking to bring depository funding into the fold…And it feels like a good time to pursue that now that we’ve become sustainably profitable, and we think we’re a really strong candidate for a charter.

The short-term BNPL loans give important signals about consumer health.—LB

      

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TALENT MANAGEMENT

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Pick your poison: AI speeding up the pace of work, or shrinking the workforce?

Unfortunately, many companies are experiencing both of these transformations…and for employees it’s creating “the two-job job,” a recent Korn Ferry report found. The majority (61%) of workers feel like they’re juggling the workload of two jobs, and nearly half (45%) feel overworked and unable to deliver quality work.

“What’s happened is AI has been just thrown on top of my work, so AI feels like an additional thing I have to accommodate. So, the two-job job is probably an understatement for most people. It’s probably more like a three-job job,” said Roger Philby, Korn Ferry’s UK head of consulting and a global leader of the firm’s people strategy and performance practice.

What’s causing this? AI promised to increase efficiency and productivity, making work easier for humans. But, in many instances, it has increased workloads and caused mental fatigue, HR Brew previously reported.

Some workers are frustrated that AI has stripped away an enjoyable part of their job, HR Brew reports.—MC

      

market forces

Francis Scialabba

Today’s top finance reads

Stat: 7%. That’s the unemployment rate for Black workers in September, a percentage point climb from the prior month and nearly double the unemployment rate of white workers. (The New York Times)

Quote: “Are we going ⁠to get back to the low-90s gross margin percentage? I don’t know. But is that ​the thing I would be acutely focused on? No.”—Figma CFO Praveer Melwani, on uncertainty that it will return to higher gross margin levels amid high AI spending (Reuters)

Read: The five people shaping Anthropic’s IPO. (The Wall Street Journal)

Jobs

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