REUTERS

SAN FRANCISCO

FACEBOOK aims to raise about $10.6 billion in Silicon Valley’s largest IPO, dwarfing the coming-out parties of tech companies like Google and granting the world’s largest social network a market value close to Amazon.com’s.

The eight-year-old social network that began as Mark Zuckerberg’s Harvard dorm room project indicated an initial public offering price range of between $28 and $35 a share on Thursday, which would value the company at $77 billion to $96 billion.

The size of the IPO reflects the company’s growth and bullish expectations about its money-making potential as a hub for everything from advertising to commerce.

“We certainly haven’t ever seen a tech IPO on this grandiose a scale,” said Lise Buyer, a principal with the IPO advisory firm Class V Group.

Buyer, who worked on Google’s 2004 IPO, said the question about a company that’s already this big and that is raising this much money is how many of the glory days of growth are in the past versus how many are ahead.

Facebook stands to raise as much as $12 billion at the upper end of its planned range.