Company is making more money than ever, but capex costs keep rising.
Social media giant Meta Platforms said that its revenue for the past quarter rose 22 percent compared to last year, hitting $47.5 billion.
Profits increased some 36 percent to $18.3bn. However, costs also rose, up 12 percent to $27bn, thanks to a heavy spend on data centers, servers, and individual AI researchers.
Meta said that it expected capex for the year to be between $66bn and $72bn, a slight tweak on a May forecast of $64-72bn. Last year, Meta's capex was $39.23bn, representing a huge jump as the company builds out a vast AI data center portfolio.
That growth is expected to continue into next year, the company's CFO Susan Li said. "We expect that developing leading AI infrastructure will be a core advantage in developing the best AI models and product experiences. So we expect to ramp our investments significantly in 2026 to support that work."
Servers will "ultimately be the biggest bulk of capex spend," Li noted, but added that the company was still planning when to deploy capacity.
Li also addressed reports that Meta could turn to private capital firms to finance its US data center build. "We certainly expect that we will finance some large share of that ourselves, but we're also exploring ways to work with financial partners to co-develop data centers.
"We don't have any finalized transactions to announce, but we generally believe that there will be models here that will attract significant external financing to support large-scale data center projects that are developed using our ability to build world-class infrastructure while providing us with flexibility should our infrastructure requirements change over time. So we are exploring many different paths."
In June, Bloomberg reported that the company is in discussions with the likes of Apollo Global Management, KKR, Brookfield, Carlyle, and Pimco over a $29bn deal.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg called the AI data center buildout "a massive investment." He added: "We do take very seriously that this is a massive amount of capital to convert into many gigawatts of compute which we think is going to help us produce leading research and quality products."
In July, Zuckerberg revealed that the company planned to spend "hundreds of billions of dollars" on data centers for its AI efforts, and set up a new 'superintelligence' unit.
"We're actually building several multi-gigawatt clusters. We're calling the first one Prometheus, and it's coming online in 2026," Zuckerberg said at the time. "We're also building Hyperion, which will be able to scale up to 5GW over several years. We're building multiple more titan clusters as well. Just one of these covers a significant part of the footprint of Manhattan."
For the new Superintelligence team, Zuckerberg has offered OpenAI, Google, Thinking Machines Labs, and Apple workers as much as $200 million over four years to join.
Meta has also acquired a 49 percent stake in data labeling company Scale AI and hired its CEO, Alexandr Wang, for the new unit. Nat Friedman, former GitHub CEO, and Daniel Gross, the CEO and co-founder of Safe Superintelligence, also joined the team.
