Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Meta Platforms Inc., during the Meta Connect event in Menlo Park, California, US, on Wednesday, Sept. 17, 2025.
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."
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