Meta to allocate up to $135B to AI in 2026, shifting company spending toward AI

Meta told investors on January 28 that it expects 2026 capital expenditures of $115 billion to $135 billion, with the increase driven by artificial intelligence and its core business. (investor.fb.com) (s21.q4cdn.com) Chief Financial Officer Susan Li said the spending range includes principal payments on finance leases. She said the year-over-year growth would support Meta Superintelligence Labs efforts and the company’s core operations. (s21.q4cdn.com) That guidance implies a sharp jump from Meta’s $72.22 billion in 2025 capital expenditures. Data Center Dynamics, citing Meta’s filings and call, said the increase is tied to data center expansion, depreciation and third-party cloud infrastructure. (datacenterdynamics.com) (s21.q4cdn.com) Meta’s case to investors is that the spending is arriving alongside unusually strong financial results. The company reported fourth-quarter 2025 revenue of $59.9 billion, up 24% year over year, and net income of $22.8 billion. (s21.q4cdn.com) (variety.com) Mark Zuckerberg told investors that Meta was seeing “a major AI acceleration” and said agents were starting to work. He tied that to new products, internal productivity and a broader push toward what he called “personal superintelligence.” (s21.q4cdn.com) The spending plan fits a pattern across big technology companies, which have been pouring cash into chips, servers and power-hungry data centers to train and run large AI models. Reuters reported last week that Wall Street was watching Meta and Microsoft for signs of how aggressively they would raise 2026 AI capital spending. (msn.com) Reports published on April 23 and April 24 said Meta also planned to cut about 8,000 jobs and stop filling roughly 6,000 open roles as it redirected resources toward AI. CNBC and TechCrunch both attributed those figures to reporting on an internal memo and people familiar with the plans. (cnbc.com) (techcrunch.com) Those reported job cuts were not part of the January earnings guidance itself, but they sharpened the tradeoff investors are now measuring: more money for computing infrastructure, fewer people on payroll. Reuters-described summaries carried by other outlets said the reductions would begin on May 20. (msn.com) (straitstimes.com) The immediate question is whether Meta can keep turning that spending into ad growth, new AI products and lower costs elsewhere. For now, the company has told investors it is willing to spend at a scale that would have looked extreme even a year ago. (s21.q4cdn.com) (datacenterdynamics.com)