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Meta said its capital expenditures could nearly double to $135bn this year as part of its increasingly radical AI spending plans, while record revenue boosted its share price as much as 10 per cent in after-hours trading.
The social media giant on Wednesday forecast capital expenditures between $115bn and $135bn in 2026, well above analysts’ estimates of about $110bn. Its 2025 capital expenditures totalled $72bn.
Revenues rose 24 per cent year on year in the fourth quarter to a record $59.9bn, beating forecasts of $58.4bn. Net income increased 9 per cent to $22.8bn, also ahead of expectations of $21bn.
Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, who has doubled down on a vastly expensive effort to build advanced AI, said “AI-driven performance gains” and holiday demand helped to boost earnings.
“We are now seeing a major AI acceleration. I expect 2026 to be a year where this wave accelerates even further,” he said.
Zuckerberg has faced pressure from Wall Street to justify the company’s massive spending on AI. But the strong earnings appeared to have bought him time to build out his vision for the technology.
Meta shares were nearly 8 per cent higher in after-market trading on Wednesday.
The Facebook founder said AI, including large language models, would continue to improve Meta’s existing social media and advertising business by delivering highly personalised content to users. Zuckerberg said current recommendations systems for users’ feeds and for advertising were “primitive compared to what will be possible soon”.
Over the past year, Zuckerberg has intensified Meta’s push to develop “personal superintelligence” in an attempt to catch up with rivals such as OpenAI and Google in building top-performing models. He has poured billions of dollars into poaching top talent from peers and building out a fleet of data centres across the globe.
He reassured investors that Meta would start launching new AI models and products in the coming months, with new opportunities to make money through subscriptions, advertising and commerce.
Zuckerberg appeared to temper expectations after its previous Llama 4 model, released last April, lagged expectations. He said the company’s next models would be “good” but that the company would “steadily push the frontier over the course of the year”.
The FT reported in December that the company was aiming for its new large language model, codenamed Avocado, to perform at the same level as Google’s Gemini 2.5 upon its release and catch up to Gemini 3 by the summer.
Investors punished the tech group after its last earnings in October after news of Zuckerberg’s plans for greater data centre spending. Its shares fell more than 11 per cent the following day, wiping almost $208bn from its market capitalisation.
Since then, however, Zuckerberg has only increased his infrastructure ambitions. Earlier this month he created an initiative called Meta Compute focused on 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 equivalent to the output of a nuclear reactor.
Zuckerberg also this month named Goldman Sachs executive Dina Powell McCormick as the company’s new president and vice-chair.
A former senior official in Donald Trump’s first administration, she has been tasked with developing partnerships with governments to finance and deploy data centres around the world.
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On Wednesday, Zuckerberg said the company was investing further in developing its own chips and that he expected “the cost per gigawatt to decrease significantly over time through optimising both our technology and supply chain”. He also said the company was investing in its own AI coding tools to improve the output of its engineers.
Meta forecasts total expenses this year will be between $162bn and $169bn, largely driven by increased investment in AI infrastructure costs and talent.
Meanwhile, the company has been pulling back investment elsewhere, such as its lossmaking efforts to build an avatar-filled “Metaverse”.
Earlier in January, the company cut about 1,500 jobs in the division and shuttered several initiatives and virtual reality gaming studios.
Meta is now focused on AI-powered wearables, which include its Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses, sales of which more than tripled in 2025, Zuckerberg said on Wednesday.