Meta's 2026 AI Capex: $115–135B, Nearly Double

Meta guided its 2026 AI capital expenditure to $115–135 billion, nearly double last year's — a posture of all-out pursuit of OpenAI and Google.

Three key facts

Nearly doubled. From less than half that figure a year ago to $115–135B now — this isn't raising the bet, it's shoving every chip to the center of the table.

Mostly infrastructure. The bulk goes to data centers, in-house chips, and a mountain of GPUs — essentially prepaying a sky-high bill for AI returns that haven't fully materialized yet.

The arms race escalates. With Meta, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI all pushing annual spend toward the hundred-billion mark, the barrier to entry is now set where only a handful of giants can play.

WangDou's Take

Zuckerberg just wrote "better to burn it wrong than miss it" straight into the financials. $135 billion — more than most countries' annual military budgets — poured into stacking GPUs. But buying compute is easy; buying people who know what to do with it is hard. Money builds data centers; it doesn't build judgment. What this arms race finally comes down to isn't who has the most cards — it's who figures out what to do with them first.

Source: Crescendo AI — Latest AI News and Updates (June 2026)