Mark Zuckerberg set out Meta’s appetite for artificial intelligence at the company’s Connect event in September, invoking the Latin phrase “Aut Caesar Aut Nihil” as he said the company was committing its full resources to AI.
The commitment had been building through 2024. In April, Meta said it could raise spending on AI infrastructure by as much as $10 billion, after initially setting a digital infrastructure investment plan of between $30 billion and $37 billion for the year. By the third quarter, it had lifted the lower end of its capital-expenditure guidance to $38 billion while leaving the upper end at $40 billion.
Meta also put its AI assistant into the search bars of Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp and Messenger in April. The company’s nearly four billion users give it one of the technology sector’s broadest channels for generative AI, and Zuckerberg said by December that the assistant had reached nearly 600 million monthly active users.
By late December 2024, Meta’s stock price had reached a record high. The capital demands have since grown sharply. Capital expenditure rose from $39.2 billion in 2024 to $72.2 billion in 2025. Meta has described expected capital expenditure this year as $130 billion to $145 billion, while giving a full-year capex range of $135 billion to $145 billion.
The company has tried to reduce the cost and time involved in building its data centres. Alan Duong, Meta’s global director of data centre engineering, said construction costs fell by 31 percent and construction times were cut by half at projects in Kuna, Idaho, and Temple, Texas.
Even so, the spending has altered the financial picture. Meta reported negative free cash flow of $2.12 billion in the third quarter, although revenue rose 26% from a year earlier to $64.60 billion, above the $63.37 billion analysts had expected.
On Wednesday, Meta said it would create a new class of nonvoting Class C common stock. The company said the shares were intended to preserve its “founder-led structure” and “provide Meta the ability to finance its growth.”
On Thursday, after the results, the spread on Meta’s five-year credit default swaps reached all-time highs, signalling investor concern about default risk. Meta shares fell nearly 7% that day.
The company’s AI strategy has also involved retrenchment in some areas. In October 2025, Meta cut about 600 AI jobs, including jobs in FAIR, its research lab. Its Reality Labs division has continued to record multi-billion-dollar operating losses tied to metaverse development.
The central question is whether the revenue growth and wide distribution of Meta’s AI products will justify the infrastructure outlay. For now, the figures show strong sales alongside negative free cash flow and a market placing a higher price on protection against default.
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