Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Meta Platforms Inc., during the Meta Connect event in Menlo Park, California, US, on Wednesday, Sept. 17, 2025.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg plans to ramp up his company’s spending on artificial intelligence in 2026. Wall Street seems fine with that strategy.
In its fourth-quarter earnings report on Wednesday, Meta beat on the top and bottom lines while also revealing that its AI-related capital expenditures this year will be between $115 billion and $135 billion. That’s nearly twice the amount Meta spent on capex last year, when the company revamped its AI unit.
Although investors have previously expressed concern about Meta’s AI spending spree, they took comfort in the company’s latest results, which showed 24% year-over-year revenue growth, driven by online ads. Meta shares, which trailed the market last year, popped as much as 10% in after-hours trading.
“As we plan for the future, we will continue to invest very significantly in infrastructure to train leading models and deliver personal super intelligence to billions of people and businesses around the world,” Zuckerberg told analysts during the earnings call.
Zuckerberg was referring to Meta’s ambitious data center buildouts intended to anchor both current and future AI projects.
Meta finance chief Susan Li told analysts that the company continues to be “capacity constrained,” meaning it needs more computing power to further improve its core ad business while also providing its AI team the necessary resources to create more advanced models and products.
“Our teams have done a great job ramping up our infrastructure through the course of 2025, but demands for compute resources across the company have increased even faster than our supply,” Li said.
Zuckerberg said 2026 will be a major year for AI, with Meta’s investments geared towards supporting his mission for “building personal super intelligence.”
Whether Meta will have much by way of new AI products that can generate revenue remains a major question, and one Zuckerberg hasn’t clearly answered.
“I mean, we’re going to roll out new products over the course of the year,” Zuckerberg said on the call. “I think the important thing is, we’re not just launching one thing, and we’re building a lot of things.”
Perhaps Zuckerberg’s biggest swing last year was the $14.3 billion investment in Scale AI, which brought founder and CEO Alexandr Wang and some of his top engineers and researchers to Meta. Wang is now leading Meta’s TBD AI unit, which has been testing a new frontier model code-named Avocado that’s intended to be a successor to the company’s Llama family of models, CNBC reported.
“I expect our first models will be good but, more importantly, will show the rapid trajectory that we’re on,” Zuckerberg said Wednesday. “And then I expect us to steadily push the frontier over the course of the year as we continue to release new models.”
Asked on the call why Meta needs to develop its own powerhouse AI foundation model, Zuckerberg said it’s important because Meta is a “deep technology company.”
Meta can’t risk being “constrained to what others in the ecosystem are building or allow us to build,” he said, adding that controlling a model allows you to help “shape the future of these products.”
In the meantime, online advertising still accounts for the overwhelming majority of Meta’s revenue. As long as that business continues to dominate in mobile, exceed expectations and throw off billions of dollars of cash a quarter, Zuckerberg is likely to get plenty of leeway to pursue his AI ambitions.
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https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/28/metas-zuckerberg-gets-green-light-from-wall-street-to-invest-in-ai.html
