The Silicon Valley company projected more spending this year and said it would continue in 2026 as it hires A.I. researchers and builds data centers to power the technology.
In its quest to win Silicon Valley’s artificial intelligence race, Meta has shelled out tens of billions of dollars on data centers and A.I. researchers.
On Wednesday, Meta, which owns Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp, indicated that the spending would not stop.
The company raised its capital expenditure forecast for this year to $70 billion to $72 billion, from a previous estimate of $66 billion to $72 billion. Most of that will be spent on data centers, which are the computing facilities that power artificial intelligence development, and compensation for A.I. researchers. Meta added that capital expenditures would “be notably larger in 2026 than 2025.”
That puts Meta’s capital expenditures closer to larger tech giants like Microsoft, which had projected spending of $88 billion for its 2025 fiscal year. For Meta, the forecast is a large jump from spending in prior years: $28 billion in 2023 and $39 billion last year. Next year, the company’s expenditures could be as much as $100 billion, according to analyst estimates.
Meta’s core business of online advertising continued to provide the fuel for the A.I. spending. For the third quarter, revenue was $51.2 billion, up 26 percent from a year earlier. Profit was $2.7 billion, down 83 percent from a year earlier because of a $15.9 billion income tax charge.
“I’m very focused on establishing Meta as the leading, frontier A.I. lab,” Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, said in an earnings call. Over a billion people use Meta A.I. each month, he added.