Meta plans up to $135 billion AI spending surge as Zuckerberg bets on major AI acceleration

Zuckerberg teases agentic commerce tools and major AI rollout in 2026

Mark Zuckerberg says Meta users will start to see new AI models and products from the company in a matter of months. "In 2025, we rebuilt the foundations of our AI program," Zuckerberg said on an investor call Wednesday, referring to the company's recently restructured AI lab. "Over the coming months, we're going to start shipping our new models and products... and I expect us to steadily push the frontier over the course of the new year." But while Zuckerberg didn't give specific timelines or products, he highlighted AI-driven commerce as a particular area of focus for Meta. "This also has implications for commerce," Zuckerberg continued. "New agentic shopping tools will allow people to find just the right set of products from the businesses in our catalog." That proposal echoes broader interest in AI-powered shopping assistants across the industry. Both Google and OpenAI have built platforms for agent-enabled transactions, with companies like Stripe and Uber signed on as partners. But while other AI labs have already built significant technical infrastructure, Meta believes its access to personal data will prove uniquely valuable. "We're starting to see the promise of AI that understands our personal context, including our history, our interests, our content and our relationships," Zuckerberg said on the call. "A lot of what makes agents valuable is the unique context that they can see, and we believe that Meta will be able to provide a uniquely personal experience." In December, Meta acquired the general-purpose agent developer Manus, which provides similar technology. At the time, Meta said it would "continue to operate and sell the Manus service, as well as integrate it into our products." The investor call was timed to the release of Meta's most recent quarterly earnings, which also disclosed a significant increase in new infrastructure spending. The company now anticipates that it will spend between $115 billion and $135 billion on overall capital expenditures over the course of 2026, up from $72 billion in 2025. In its official filing, Meta attributed the jump to "increased investment to support our Meta Superintelligence Labs efforts and core business." While significant, the figure still falls short of the projected $600 billion that Zuckerberg reportedly projected for Meta's infrastructure spending through 2028. Meta has previously drawn criticism from investors for failing to clearly state how its massive AI investment will translate to the company's bottom line. But while details are still thin, Zuckerberg made it clear that the AI labs work would reach the public soon. "This is going to be a big year for delivering personal superintelligence, accelerating our business, building infrastructure for the future, and shaping how our company will work going forward," he told investors.

Meta boosts annual capex sharply on superintelligence push, shares jump

Jan 28 (Reuters) - Instagram-owner Meta (META.O), opens new tab on Wednesday boosted its capital spending plans for the new year by 73% in the pursuit of "superintelligence," an effort to offer deeply personalized artificial intelligence to its large social media user base. Meta shares jumped nearly 9% in extended trading. The company also forecast first-quarter revenue above Wall Street expectations and beat profit and revenue estimates for its quarter ended December 31. Meta expects its capital expenditure for 2026 to be between $115 billion and $135 billion, driven largely by infrastructure costs including payments made to third-party cloud providers, higher depreciation of its AI data center assets, and higher infrastructure operating expenses. This compares with expectations of a $109.9 billion capex budget, according to Visible Alpha, and $72.22 billion Meta spent last year. "This is going to be a big year for delivering personal superintelligence, accelerating our business infrastructure for the future and shaping how our company will work going forward," CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on a conference call with analysts. Meta forecast 2026 total expenses to be in the range of $162 billion and $169 billion, up from $117.69 billion a year ago, driven by rising employee compensation as the company spends millions to hire top AI talent. For the first-quarter, Meta expects revenue between $53.5 billion and $56.5 billion, compared with analysts' ⁠average estimate of $51.41 billion, according to data compiled by LSEG. Meta is building several gigawatt-scale data centers across the United States, including one in rural Louisiana, a project U.S. President Donald Trump said would cost $50 billion. It would be large enough to cover a significant part of Manhattan. Last year, Meta signed contracts with Alphabet (GOOGL.O), opens new tab, CoreWeave (CRWV.O), opens new tab, Nebius (NBIS.O), opens new tab for additional compute power, signaling a pressing need for capacity expansion due to internal constraints. The spending spree has been prompted by Big Tech's rivalry in Silicon Valley's AI race, where Meta has stumbled after its Llama 4 model met with a poor reception. Now the company is betting on its new AI models, launched internally this month. Meta's ad platform has remained its growth engine, allowing advertisers to automate ⁠and personalize their campaigns and ⁠help the company support its investments to achieve superintelligence - a theoretical milestone where machines could surpass human performance. The company is laying off about 10% of staff at its Reality Labs group, which has about 15,000 employees, as it redirects resources from some of its metaverse products to wearables. The unit -- which has accumulated more than $70 billion in losses since 2021 -- includes Meta's ambitious metaverse bet that prompted the company to change its name from Facebook. The holiday quarter results come as the company's Advantage+ automated advertising suite is gaining strong advertiser adoption due to its ability to streamline campaign setup and enhance return on ad spend, analysts have said. In the past year, Meta launched ads on WhatsApp and Threads, creating direct rivalry with platforms like Elon Musk's X, while Instagram's Reels continues to jostle with TikTok and YouTube Shorts within the lucrative short-video market. Reporting by Jaspreet Singh in Bengaluru; Additional reporting by Echo Wang in New York and Juby Babu in Mexico City; Editing by Leroy Leo, Sayantani Ghosh and Diane Craft Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab

Meta's Mark Zuckerberg gets green light from Wall Street to keep pouring money into AI

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg plans to ramp up his company's spending on artificial intelligence in 2026. Wall Street seems fine with that plan. In its fourth-quarter earnings report on Wednesday, Meta beat on the top and bottom lines while also revealing that its AI-related capital expenditures this year will be between $115 billion and $135 billion. That's nearly twice the amount Meta spent on capex last year, when the company revamped its AI unit. Although investors have previously expressed concern about Meta's AI spending spree, they took comfort in the company's latest results, which showed 24% year-over-year revenue growth, driven by online ads. Meta shares, which trailed the market last year, popped as much as 10% in after-hours trading. "As we plan for the future, we will continue to invest very significantly in infrastructure to train leading models and deliver personal super intelligence to billions of people and businesses around the world," Zuckerberg told analysts during the earnings call. Zuckerberg was referring to Meta's ambitious data center buildouts intended to anchor both current and future AI projects. Meta finance chief Susan Li told analysts that the company continues to be "capacity constrained," meaning it needs more computing power to further improve its core ad business while also providing its AI team the necessary resources to create more advanced models and products. "Our teams have done a great job ramping up our infrastructure through the course of 2025, but demands for compute resources across the company have increased even faster than our supply," Li said. Zuckerberg said 2026 will be a major year for AI, with Meta's investments geared towards supporting his mission for "building personal super intelligence." Whether Meta will have much by way of new AI products that can generate revenue remains a major question, and one Zuckerberg hasn't clearly answered. "I mean, we're going to roll out new products over the course of the year," Zuckerberg said on the call. "I think the important thing is, we're not just launching one thing, and we're building a lot of things." Perhaps Zuckerberg's biggest swing last year was the $14.3 billion investment in Scale AI, which brought founder and CEO Alexandr Wang and some of his top engineers and researchers to Meta. Wang is now leading Meta's TBD AI unit, which has been testing a new frontier model code-named Avocado that's intended to be a successor to the company's Llama family of models, CNBC reported. "I expect our first models will be good but, more importantly, will show the rapid trajectory that we're on," Zuckerberg said Wednesday. "And then I expect us to steadily push the frontier over the course of the year as we continue to release new models." Asked on the call why Meta needs to develop its own powerhouse AI foundation model, Zuckerberg said it's important because Meta is a "deep technology company." Meta can't risk being "constrained to what others in the ecosystem are building or allow us to build," he said, adding that controlling a model allows you to help "shape the future of these products." In the meantime, online advertising still accounts for the overwhelming majority of Meta's revenue. As long as that business continues to dominate in mobile, exceed expectations and throw off billions of dollars of cash a quarter, Zuckerberg is likely to get plenty of leeway to pursue his AI ambitions.

Meta stock pops on positive profit outlook despite AI spending surge

Why it matters: Meta has been pouring billions into AI talent and infrastructure, which executives have said is essential to the company's future and to keep the U.S. competitive in AI. * "We are now seeing a major AI acceleration. I expect 2026 to be a year where this wave accelerates even further on several fronts," CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on the earnings call, pointing to agents, more personalized feeds, shopping tools and AI glasses. * "We're starting to see agents really work. This will unlock the ability to build completely new products and transform how we work," he added. By the numbers: Meta said it expects 2026 capital expenditures of between $115 billion to $135 billion. That's up from $72.22 billion in 2025. * For the fourth quarter, Meta's capital expenditures were $22.14 billion, compared to expectations of $21.97 billion, CNBC reported citing StreetAccount. * The company said it expected higher operating income in 2026. It reported $83.3 billion in 2025, up 20% from the prior year. * For Reality Labs, its division focused on virtual and augmented reality, Meta reported an operating loss of $6 billion and revenue of $955 million for the quarter. The big picture: Meta's results increasingly have been evaluated on how aggressively it's spending on its AI ambitions. * Earlier this month, Zuckerberg announced a new "top-level" initiative called Meta Compute to build "tens of gigawatts" of AI infrastructure this decade. * Meta said on Tuesday it would pay Corning up to $6 billion through 2030 for fiber-optic cable in its AI data centers. Zoom in: Meta has been scaling back parts of Reality Labs. It recently laid off about 10% of that staff, primarily those who work on VR-related initiatives. * Zuckerberg said on Wednesday's earnings call that Meta is directing more investment toward glasses and wearables and focused on improving Horizon, its VR software, for mobile and make VR profitable. * The company has been investing more in marketing its glasses like Ray-Ban Meta and Oakley Meta, the former of which advertised in last year's Super Bowl and the latter will advertise during this year's game. * "I think that we're in a moment similar to when smartphones arrived, and it was clearly only a matter of time until all those flip phones became smartphones. It's hard to imagine a world in several years where most glasses that people wear aren't AI glasses," Zuckerberg said. * Snap Inc., one of Meta's competitors for smart glasses, announced on Wednesday it is launching Specs Inc. as a distinct subsidiary for its AR glasses. That move opens it up to potential minority investments. Zoom out: Meta continues to face legal and regulatory scrutiny, including a landmark trial in Los Angeles over claims its platform deliberately addicts and harms young people. TikTok and Snap chose to settle, whereas Meta and YouTube will stand trial.

Meta crushes Q4 as Zuckerberg bets big on a "major AI acceleration" in 2026 | Fortune

On Meta's 4th quarter earnings call, CEO Mark Zuckerberg predicted his company would experience a "major AI acceleration" in 2026 as it races to catch up after falling behind Google, OpenAI and Anthropic in leading AI models in 2025. It has plenty of money to make that happen: The company beat Q4 expectations, delivering $59.89 billion in revenue, compared to consensus analyst estimates of $58.41 billion. Earnings per share came in at $8.88 ,versus expectations for $8.19. And the company made clear spending will continue to be massive. Meta forecast its capital expenditures could rise to as much as $135 billion this year, nearly double the $72 billion it reported in 2025, as it unveiled its most radical AI spending plans to date, largely driven by increased investment in AI infrastructure costs and talent. In comments on the earnings call, Zuckerberg harked back to last summer, when he rebuilt the foundations of Meta's AI program, bringing in Scale CEO Alexandr Wang to head up Meta Superintelligence Labs. Over the coming months, he said, Meta would start shipping AI models and products. "I expect our first models will be good, but more importantly, they will show the rapid trajectory that we're on," he said. "And then I expect us to steadily push the frontier over the course of the year, as we continue to release new models." The goal? Zuckerberg again made clear that it is "personal superintelligence." "We're starting to see the promise of AI that understands our personal context, including our history, our history, our interests, our content and our relationships," he said. "A lot of what makes agents valuable is the unique context that they can see, and we believe that Meta will be able to provide a uniquely personal experience." In addition, he said the company is working on merging LLMs with Meta's recommendation systems on its platforms, including Facebook, Instagram and Threads. "We think that the current systems are primitive compared to what will be possible soon," he said. "Soon, we'll be able to understand people's unique personal goals and tailor feeds to show each person content that helps them improve their lives in the ways that they want." Zuckerberg also predicted that in the near future, new immersive and interactive formats will be possible only because of AI advances. "Today, our apps feel like algorithms that recommend content," he said. "Soon, you'll open our apps and you'll have an AI that understands you and also happens to be able to show you great content or even generate great personalized content for you." Glasses, he said, are "the ultimate incarnation of this vision," pointing out that sales of Meta's Ray-Ban glasses more than tripled last year and that investment in the company's Reality Labs will mostly go towards glasses and wearables. The biggest spend, however, will be in infrastructure. He touted the recently announced Meta Compute organization, saying he believed being the most efficient company in building infrastructure for AI will become a strategic advantage. Finally, Zuckerberg announced that Meta is investing in AI tools for its workforce, saying the company will elevate individual contributors and flatten teams. "Our north star is building the best place for individuals to make a massive impact," he said, pointing out that what many big teams at Meta are doing can now be accomplished by "a single, very talented person."

Meta beats earnings as 2026 AI capex tops out at $135 billion

This year, Mark Zuckerberg is planning to write the kind of corporate check that can change a company's personality. Wednesday, Meta $META delivered a monster quarter -- $59.9 billion in revenue and $8.88 in EPS -- and then budgeted 2026 like it plans to buy the future in bulk: $115 billion to $135 billion in capex, plus expenses heading toward $169 billion, as Meta keeps working to turn "superintelligence" into a procurement problem. Shares jumped about 10% in after-hours trading as investors digested the heady combination of stronger-than-expected results and an exceedingly bullish near-term revenue outlook -- even with that spending plan that reads like an infrastructure bond prospectus. Wall Street will happily applaud a beat, but it will pay for a story -- and Meta handed it one: strong advertising now, enormous AI buildout next, and enough confidence to promise that operating income in 2026 will land above 2025 even after the spending step-up. Still, Meta's guidance is the kind of guidance that can trigger investor flinching -- and it did, last time. In late October, Meta warned that capex growth in 2026 would be "notably larger" than 2025 but didn't actually put numbers on it. The stock fell about 8% in after-hours trading. This time, Meta put the numbers on the bill, framed them as deliberate, and paired them with a Q1 revenue outlook of $53.5 billion to $56.5 billion that topped many expectations. Zuckerberg's contribution to the storyline was a vision statement, a recruiting pitch, and an explanation for why Meta is suddenly talking like a utility company that also happens to sell ads. "We had strong business performance in 2025," he said in the release, adding that he's "looking forward to advancing personal superintelligence... in 2026." He may want to talk about "personal superintelligence," but the Street still cares about the less exciting ads. Meta is still a very large advertising business that keeps finding new ways to wring more money out of the same human habit -- staring at a screen and calling it fun. The ad business is still a compounding engine with an unusually large moat; ad impressions rose 18% year over year in Q4, and the average price per ad increased 6%. Family daily active people averaged 3.58 billion in December. Those are the kinds of numbers that let a company talk about "massive investment" without immediately getting sent to the principal's office. Because crucially, AI ambition doesn't float on vibes. It sits on concrete. And it requires lots and lots of money. "AI" is increasingly shorthand for "capex," and capex requires a cash fountain that doesn't blink when everyone else does; Meta's spending plan is nearly double the already massive $72.2 billion it reported for 2025, and its total expenses are up from $117.7 billion in 2025. Meta's outlook is explicit about where the money will go. It expects 2026 expense growth to be driven mostly by infrastructure costs -- third-party cloud spend, higher depreciation, and higher infrastructure operating expenses -- with compensation next, as it hires and pays technical talent to staff its priority areas. But the quarterly earnings also show the cost of the pivot. Operating margin fell to 41% from 48% a year earlier as costs and expenses rose 40% year over year in the quarter. Research and development alone was $17.1 billion in Q4, up from $12.2 billion a year earlier. Meta wants to overwhelm any anxiety with a spend now, own capacity later argument. Its buildout story has been getting more literal by the week. Zuckerberg has been framing the bottleneck as compute and power -- measured in gigawatts -- and the company has rolled out "Meta Compute" as an effort to secure that capacity and the partnerships that come with it. The same dynamic shows up in Meta leaning on third-party cloud providers to bridge constraints while it scales its own footprint, including a major data center project in Louisiana. If your mental model of Meta is still "social app company," the company is asking you to update your software. This is also an industrial buildout. But funding that buildout is a different story; Meta's balance sheet is preparing for a more capital-intensive life. Long-term debt ended 2025 at $58.74 billion, up sharply from the year prior, and Meta issued roughly $29.9 billion of long-term debt net in Q4 alone. That fits with the broader financing drumbeat around Big Tech tapping debt markets to fund AI infrastructure, including Meta's move last fall toward a bond offering "up to $30 billion." There are, of course, the usual reminders that Meta is still Meta: regulatory and legal headwinds, especially around youth-related issues, and more changes coming to its Less Personalized Ads offering in Europe as it keeps trying to thread the needle between compliance and monetization. But the legal calendar is the kind of overhang that doesn't wait for an AI story. Meta is asking investors to grade it on a new curve. The market's initial reaction suggests that, for now, investors are willing to entertain that idea -- as long as the ad engine keeps paying the bill and the near-term guide stays buoyant. So far, so good.

Meta Expects Annual Capital Expenditures to Rise on Superintelligence Push

Jan 28 (Reuters) - Meta on Wednesday forecast its annual capital expenditure to increase sharply, as the social media giant builds artificial intelligence infrastructure in the pursuit of superintelligence. Shares of the company fell about 2% in extended trading. The Facebook and Instagram parent expects annual capital expenditure to be between $115 billion and $135 billion, compared with $72.22 billion a year earlier. Meta's ad platform has remained its growth engine, allowing advertisers to automate and personalize their campaigns and help ⁠the company support its investments in AI infrastructure to achieve superingelligence - a theoretical milestone where machines could surpass human performance. The company is laying off about 10% of staff at its Reality Labs group, which has about 15,000 employees, as it redirects resources from some of its metaverse products to wearables. The unit -- which has accumulated more than $70 billion in losses since 2021 -- includes Meta's ambitious metaverse bet that prompted the company to change its name from Facebook. Meta is ⁠building several gigawatt-scale data centers across the United States, including one in rural Louisiana, a project U.S. President Donald Trump said would cost $50 billion. It would be large enough to cover a significant part of Manhattan. To boost its energy infrastructure, Meta has partnered with companies such as Vistra, Oklo, and TerraPower that will position it as one of the leading corporate buyers of nuclear power in the world. Meta recently appointed Trump ally Dina Powell McCormick as president and vice chairman in a bid to drive partnerships with governments and investors for its AI projects. Along with other senior executives she will also focus on the company's global fleet of data centers. Last year, Meta signed contracts with Alphabet, CoreWeave, Nebius for additional compute power, signaling pressing need for capacity expansion due to internal constraints. The spending spree has been prompted by Big Tech's rivalry in Silicon Valley's AI race, where Meta has stumbled after its Llama 4 model met with a poor reception. Now the company is betting on its new AI models, launched internally this month. The holiday quarter results come as the company's Advantage+ automated advertising suite is gaining strong advertiser adoption due to its ability to streamline campaign setup and enhance return on ad spend, analysts have said. In the past year, Meta launched ads on WhatsApp and Threads, creating direct rivalry with platforms like Elon Musk's X, while Instagram's Reels continues to jostle with TikTok and YouTube Shorts within the lucrative short-video market. (Reporting by Jaspreet Singh in Bengaluru; Editing by Leroy Leo)

Zuckerberg Shrugs Off Wall Street Fears and Pledges Up to $135B for AI | PYMNTS.com

"I think my answers to a lot of your questions on this particular call may be somewhat unfulfilling because we're in this interesting period where we've been rebuilding our AI effort, and we're six months into that, and I'm happy with how it's going," Meta Chairman Mark Zuckerberg told his analyst audience on the companies Q4 earnings call. "But we are going to be rolling out our initial set of models and products and businesses around that over the coming months, and I will have a lot more to share on all of those fronts at that point." The implied message: See you in 90 days. In the meantime, Meta, is planning a huge jump in spending to build out its AI muscle. Management said it expects capital expenditures in 2026 to land between $115 billion and $135 billion, nearly double the $72 billion it spent last year. A big chunk of that money will go toward new data centers and other computing infrastructure that powers AI. Meta also says it plans to hire more researchers as it works on what it calls a "superintelligent" AI model. "Soon, we'll be able to understand people's unique personal goals, and tailor feeds to show each person content that helps them improve their lives in the ways that they want," Zuckerberg said on the call. "This also has implications for commerce. Our ads today help businesses find just the right very specific people who are interested in their products. New agentic shopping tools will allow people to find just the right, very specific set of products from the businesses in our catalog. We're focused on making these experiences work across both our feeds and across business messaging." The size of the increase is striking. Meta spent $28 billion in 2023 and $39 billion in 2024. Now it's talking about spending levels that could even outpace bigger AI rivals like Google, which spent $93 billion last year. CFO Susan Li pointed out on several occasions that the operating income estimate for 2026 will be higher than 2025's number despite the increased capex. Advertising Engine Meta can afford the push because its ad business keeps throwing off cash. In the fourth quarter, revenue hit $59.89 billion, up 24% from a year earlier. Profit was $22.76 billion, up 9.2%. The company said its AI investments are already paying off by improving ad targeting and making its recommendations for videos and posts more relevant to users. In addition to the AI spend and lack of projected ROI, the call was also notable for sketching a near-term product cycle built around what he called "personal superintelligence" -- AI that can understand a user's personal context, including their history, interests and relationships, and then act on that context in useful ways. He said Meta is leaning into agents that "really work," arguing they can unlock entirely new products and also change how work gets done inside the company. A big part of that vision is folding large language models into Meta's recommendation engines, so the apps don't just suggest content, but can better understand what people are trying to accomplish and tailor experiences accordingly, including commerce. Zuckerberg pointed to "agentic shopping" tools that help people find the right products from Meta's catalog, and he also framed AI as the driver of new, more immersive media formats beyond today's text-photo-video progression. Where this all converges, Zuckerberg argued, is smart glasses. He called glasses "the ultimate incarnation" of an AI assistant that can see and hear what you do, talk with you throughout the day, and even place information or a custom interface directly in your field of view. He said sales of Meta's glasses "more than tripled" last year and likened the moment to the industry shift from flip phones to smartphones. The context is that glasses are still small compared to Meta's core machine. In the quarter, Meta reported $59.9 billion in total revenue, including $58.9 billion from its Family of Apps business. Reality Labs, the division that houses wearables and other immersive hardware, posted $955 million in Q4 revenue. But Zuckerberg made clear where the emphasis is going next, saying most Reality Labs investment will be directed toward glasses and wearables as Meta tries to turn early momentum into a mainstream device cycle.