"There’s just a lot of uncertainty around this".
Meta reported strong earnings and growing AI data center spend in its latest quarter.
The company said that it expects its 2025 capital expenditure to increase to between $64 billion and $72bn, up from the $60bn to $65bn it previously planned to spend.
That increase is partially due to "some adjustments to flex our build strategy that will enable us to really stand up capacity more quickly, both in '25 and '26," CFO Susan Li said in an earnings call.
But the "higher cost we expect to incur for infrastructure hardware this year really comes from suppliers who source from countries around the world, and there's just a lot of uncertainty around this given the ongoing trade discussions," Li continued.
"And so that is both reflected in the wider range that we are giving, and we're also working on our end on mitigations by optimizing our supply chain and our outlook is really trying to reflect our best understanding of the potential impact this year across all of that uncertainty."
The US trade war against the rest of the world has caused costs on imported goods to rocket suddenly. Similarly, retaliatory tariffs have impacted data center builds in other nations. Tariffs are paid by the importer, not the exporter.
What the tariffs are has changed regularly, but tariffs on most Chinese goods stand at 145 percent. Further duties are still expected to be levied against the chip industry.
For this past quarter, Meta spent $13.7bn - primarily on servers, data centers, and network infrastructure.
The company's revenue, primarily from advertising, continued to grow, up 16 percent over last year, despite tariff economic concerns.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg pointed to AI as helping improve advertising, increasing revenues. Shares in the company jumped 4.5 percent on the news.
However, the company still faces the looming threat of a breakup, and is in the midst of a court case with the US Federal Trade Commission over whether Instagram and WhatsApp should be spun out.
