Meta says capital expenditure could almost double to $135bn in 2026 as its AI spending plans get increasingly unhinged, while record revenue pushed the share price up as much as 10 per cent after hours.
The social media giant forecast capex of $115bn to $135bn for 2026, well above analysts’ roughly $110bn view, after 2025 capex came in at $72bn.
Revenue rose 24 per cent year on year in the fourth quarter to a record $59.9bn, beating forecasts of $58.4bn, while net income climbed nine per cent to $22.8bn, ahead of the $21bn expected.
Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said “AI-driven performance gains” and holiday demand helped to lift earnings.
“We are now seeing a major AI acceleration. I expect 2026 to be a year where this wave accelerates even further,” he said.
Meta guided current-quarter revenue at $53.5bn to $56.5bn, which was higher than expected, and that was enough to quiet the cocaine nose jobs of Wall Street for at least one more quarter.
Meta shares ended nearly seven per cent higher in after-hours trading on Wednesday, which is what happens when you print cash while setting fire to it at the same time.
Zuckerberg said AI, including large language models, will keep boosting Meta’s social media and advertising engine by serving highly personalised content, and he called current recommendation systems “primitive compared to what will be possible soon”.
Over the past year, he has pushed for “personal superintelligence” to catch rivals such as OpenAI and Google, spending billions on poaching talent and building a global fleet of data centres.
He told investors that Meta would start launching new AI models and products in the coming months, pursuing subscriptions, advertising, and commerce as routes to monetisation.
Zuckerberg talked up the acquisition of AI agent platform Manus, saying the start-up already has a “significant number” of business subscribers and that Meta could plug the tech into its products, while Chinese officials review the deal for possible technology export control violations.
After Meta’s Llama 4 model, released last April, lagged expectations, Zuckerberg tried to lower the temperature by saying the next models would be “good” and the company would “steadily push the frontier over the course of the year”.
The Financial Times reported in December that Meta wants its new large language model, codenamed Avocado, to match Google’s Gemini 2.5 at release and catch up to Gemini 3 by the summer.
Investors punished Meta after its October earnings when news of bigger data centre spending plans knocked the shares down more than 11 per cent the next day, wiping almost $208bn off market value.
Since then, Zuckerberg has only cranked the dial further, including an initiative called Meta Compute aimed at building “hundreds of gigawatts” of AI data centre capacity over the coming decades.
A single gigawatt of data centre capacity costs tens of billions of dollars to build and requires electricity roughly equivalent to that of a nuclear reactor.
This month, Meta appointed Goldman Sachs executive Dina Powell McCormick as president and vice-chair. As a former senior official in Donald Trump’s first administration, she has been tasked with building government partnerships to finance and deploy data centres worldwide.
Zuckerberg said Meta is investing more in its own chips and expects “the cost per gigawatt to decrease significantly over time through optimising both our technology and supply chain,” and he also pointed to internal AI coding tools to boost engineer output.
Meta forecasts total expenses of $162bn to $169bn this year, driven mainly by AI infrastructure and talent, while it pulls back elsewhere.
That includes its loss-making Metaverse effort, where about 1,500 jobs were cut in January, as well as several initiatives and VR gaming studios that were mothballed.
Meta is now leaning into AI-powered wearables, including Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses, with sales that more than tripled in 2025, Zuckerberg said.
