Meta Cuts Equity to Fund 'Superintelligence'
Meta is cutting employee equity for the second consecutive year to help fund a reported $135 billion investment in "superintelligence" infrastructure. The move signals a major strategic reallocation of resources toward long-term AI development. This decision reflects a leadership focus on funding large-scale, ambitious projects by adjusting employee compensation structures.
- The planned capital expenditure for 2026 is projected to be between $115 billion and $135 billion, a significant increase from the $72.22 billion invested in 2025. This level of spending on infrastructure is comparable to the entire gross domestic product of Kenya. - A major part of this strategy includes a $14.3 billion investment for a 49% stake in the AI data-labeling company Scale AI. As part of the deal, Scale AI's CEO, Alexandr Wang, has joined Meta to lead the new "Meta Superintelligence Labs." - To attract top talent for its superintelligence labs, Meta has reportedly offered compensation packages in the tens and even hundreds of millions of dollars to lure engineers and researchers from competitors. - The infrastructure build-out includes a deep partnership with NVIDIA to deploy millions of their next-generation GPUs (Blackwell and Rubin), CPUs (Grace and Vera), and Spectrum-X Ethernet networking across Meta's data centers. - Meta is also developing its own custom silicon, the Meta Training and Inference Accelerator (MTIA), which is already deployed at scale to handle ranking and recommendation workloads more efficiently than vendor-supplied chips. - This is the second consecutive year of equity reductions for employees; the company cut stock option awards by about 10% in the previous year and by another 5% this year. - In parallel with these cuts, Meta has increased the potential bonuses for named executive officers, with eligibility rising from 75% to as much as 200% of their base salary in 2025. - Mark Zuckerberg's vision is to provide a "personal superintelligence" to billions of people, which he believes will be a new era of personal empowerment, primarily accessed through smart glasses.
