Meta plans to almost treble its capital investments in AI this year, spending more on infrastructure than the whole production of certain mid-sized economies.
During a conference call discussing its FY 2025 earnings, Facebook’s parent company revealed that, in contrast to the $72.22 billion it invested in 2025, it anticipates capital expenditures this year to be between $115 billion and $135 billion.
During an earnings conference call with investors, chief financial officer Susan Li stated that this increase is intended to support both Meta’s Superintelligence Labs and its core daily operations.
If everything goes according to plan, Meta will spend roughly as much on infrastructure as Kenya’s total GDP, which was estimated by the IMF to be $136 billion in 2025.
The massive social media company isn’t the only tech company investing large sums of money to upgrade its infrastructure. Researchers at Omdia noted last year that Amazon spent more than $100 billion on datacenter capital expenditures annually.
Meta thinks that increasing AI will be profitable. “Despite the meaningful step-up in infrastructure investment, in 2026, we expect to deliver operating income that is above 2025 operating income,” Li stated.
Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s founder and CEO, defended this extravagant expenditure by saying that Meta is currently witnessing a significant acceleration of AI.
“I expect 2026 to be a year where this wave accelerates even further on several fronts. We’re starting to see agents really work. This will unlock the ability to build completely new products and transform how we work,” he said on the same conference call.
“We’re starting to see the promise of AI that understands our personal context, including our history, our interests, our content and our relationships. A lot of what makes agents valuable is the unique context that they can see,” he said.
In an effort to increase ad revenue, Zuckerberg stated that Meta is also integrating large language models (LLMs) with the recommendation engines that run Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and its ad systems.
