Story perspectives

$130-$145B AI Capex Plan Sends Meta Shares Down 11%

7/30/2026

Summary

Meta Unveils AI

Meta Platforms Inc. announced a $130 billion-$145 billion AI-focused 2026 capex plan, causing an 11% share fall.
Second-quarter revenue rose 28% to $60.8 billion while net income dropped 14% to $15.8 billion.
Free cash flow fell 91% to $784 million while Meta logged $2.4 billion in legal charges and $1.2 billion in severance.
Chief AI officer Alexandr Wang introduced the Muse Spark 1.1 model and said Meta is negotiating a $10 billion two-year AI compute lease with Anthropic.

Summary

Meta Deploys AI

Meta appointed Kunal Shah, founder of CRED, as head of WhatsApp.
Instagram now has over 2 billion daily active users and Threads exceeds 500 million monthly users.
Meta launched Meta One, a tiered subscription that bundles AI tools across its apps.
Meta runs every public Instagram Reel and Feed post through an LLM for topic-tone analysis while its business AI agents serve over one million businesses weekly on Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger.

History

Historical Context

Google’s 2014 purchase of DeepMind for $400-$650 million gave it a deep-learning foundation that later supported Google’s AI hardware, including the Tensor Processing Unit, and led to the 2023 merger of DeepMind with Google Brain. Building on that momentum, rivals such as Meta, Microsoft and Amazon have launched multi-billion-dollar AI spending programs, reshaping the competitive landscape of cloud and hardware services.

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Meta Unveils AI

Meta Platforms Inc. announced a $130 billion-$145 billion AI-focused 2026 capex plan, causing an 11% share fall.
Second-quarter revenue rose 28% to $60.8 billion while net income dropped 14% to $15.8 billion.
Free cash flow fell 91% to $784 million while Meta logged $2.4 billion in legal charges and $1.2 billion in severance.
Chief AI officer Alexandr Wang introduced the Muse Spark 1.1 model and said Meta is negotiating a $10 billion two-year AI compute lease with Anthropic.

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