Meta told investors it will spend even more on artificial intelligence this year, narrowing its capital-expenditure forecast for 2026 by lifting the floor rather than the ceiling.
The company now expects to spend between $130 billion and $145 billion, up from a prior range that started at $125 billion, roughly double what it laid out a year earlier.
The spending is landing on a fast-growing business. Meta reported second-quarter revenue of $60.8 billion, up 28% from a year earlier, its quickest growth since late 2021, as advertising held up and AI-tuned recommendations kept users scrolling.
The advertising engine did the heavy lifting. Better AI recommendations lifted engagement across Instagram and Facebook, and a stronger ad market let Meta turn that extra attention into its fastest revenue growth in years.
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What the growth is not doing is reaching the bottom of the cash statement. Free cash flow fell to $784 million, down 91% from $8.55 billion a year earlier, a collapse that shows how completely the AI build-out is swallowing the money the ads business throws off.
Profit came in soft as well. Earnings of $6.18 a share missed analysts’ expectations of $7.22, dragged down in part by legal costs, even as the top line beat forecasts.
Those legal costs are not incidental. Meta booked a $2.4 billion charge in the quarter, and a group of US states is seeking as much as $1.4 trillion in penalties over claims that its products are designed to addict young users, litigation that shadows every quarter.
The user base, at least, is still expanding. Meta counted 3.6 billion daily active people across its apps, up 3% year on year, a reassuring figure after an earlier quarter in which daily users had dipped.
Zuckerberg used the call to explain where the money goes. A large share of compute, he said, will train Meta’s models, feed the core advertising business, and power the “personal agents” he expects to become a major consumer product.
He also sketched a second act. Meta plans to “grow a large business serving large customers,” he said, a reference to renting out AI compute, a cloud-style line that would turn its vast infrastructure into a revenue stream rather than only a cost.
That framing is meant to answer the obvious worry. With capex doubling and cash flow evaporating, investors want to know when the spending becomes earning, and Zuckerberg’s reply is that the same data centres will eventually pay their own way.
The narrowing of the forecast is itself a signal. By raising the low end of the range rather than the high, Meta is effectively promising that spending will not come in light, a commitment to the build-out even as the returns remain a matter of faith.
The pattern is not Meta’s alone. Across Big Tech, the second-quarter numbers have told a similar story of surging AI investment outrunning the cash it generates, a bet the whole industry has made at once.
Meta’s version is distinctive in one respect. It is spending like a cloud provider without being one yet, funding a superintelligence ambition out of an advertising engine, and asking shareholders to trust that the two halves eventually meet.
For now, the market gets what it has grown used to. Strong revenue, thinning profit, ballooning capex, and a chief executive insisting the outlay is not a risk but a moat, quarter after quarter.
Wall Street has learned to live with the trade-off, at least for now. Meta’s shares have largely held up through the spending spree, on the bet that a company growing revenue at 28% can afford to invest heavily, provided the growth does not stall.
The reckoning, if it comes, will be about timing. Meta can afford this build-out today; the question its collapsing free cash flow raises is how many more quarters it can spend at this pace before the payoff has to arrive.
