Zuckerberg’s AI plans to fuel $40 billion spending spree

Meta reported strong Q2 earnings, posting a ​​$13.5 billion profit for the quarter—a 73% increase year over year—with revenues growing 22% from last year. And Mark Zuckerberg is going to spend those profits on AI.

“At the end of the day, we are in the fortunate position where the strong results that we're seeing in our core products and business gives us the opportunity to make deep investments for the future, and I plan to fully seize that opportunity,” said Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on the earnings call. 

But like Microsoft, who just warned investors that it is going to be spending a lot of money, on a lot of AI stuff, for a long time, Zuckerberg is letting everyone know this is all going to be very expensive. 

Noting that it is hard to see into the future, Zuckerberg said:

 “I'd rather risk building capacity before it is needed, rather than too late, given the long lead times for spinning up new infra[structure] projects.”

The building is already under way. In Q2, Meta’s capital expenditures grew 33% to $8.5 billion, and the company expects to spend $37 billion to $40 billion for the full year. 

Zuckerberg said that Meta is already working on Llama 4, the next generation of the company’s large language model due next year, but said the computing resources needed to build it are an order of magnitude greater than the current model needed.

“The amount of compute needed to train Llama 4 will likely be almost 10x more than what we used to train Llama 3, and future models will continue to grow beyond that,” said Zuckerberg.

“Our expectation is that we are going to significantly increase our investments in AI infrastructure next year,” warned Meta CFO Susan Li. 

Wall Street liked what they heard, sending Meta’s stock up 9% as the market opened today.