NEW YORK, Feb 18, 2026, 10:03 EST — Regular session
- Meta shares slipped roughly 1% during morning hours, trailing gains in the broader market.
- Nvidia has landed a multiyear agreement to provide Meta with millions of its AI chips, both current models and those still to come.
- Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO, will take the stand in a Los Angeles jury trial focused on allegations of youth addiction to social media.
Meta Platforms slipped 1.2% to $631.75 out of the gate Wednesday, shrugging off news that Nvidia landed a multiyear deal to deliver millions of AI chips to the Facebook parent. Nvidia shares picked up 1.6%. AMD lost 2.3%. Intel dipped 1.0%. Both the S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 ticked up slightly.
The partnership comes as investors scrutinize the scale and speed of Big Tech’s AI data center spending — and whether those outlays will translate into revenue soon enough. Just last month, Meta put out a 2026 capital spending estimate between $115 billion and $135 billion, highlighting mounting infrastructure and AI-related hiring costs. That has put questions about when its main ad business pays off right back in focus. (Reuters)
Chip supply, for traders, now stands in for the broader spending cycle. Land a major hardware deal, and you’re looking at a vote of confidence, sure, but also a reminder of the hefty costs — power, depreciation, all of it — stacking up long before fresh revenue or any uptick in ads makes an appearance.
Nvidia says its deal with Meta covers both on-premises setups and cloud systems, backing Meta’s push to expand AI “training” and “inference” across its data centers—in short, building and deploying models at scale. The offering brings together Nvidia’s current Blackwell GPUs, future Rubin chips, Grace and Vera CPUs, plus the necessary networking hardware. “No one deploys AI at Meta’s scale,” Jensen Huang said. Mark Zuckerberg, for his part, confirmed Meta’s plan to “build leading-edge clusters” on Nvidia’s Vera Rubin platform. (NVIDIA Investor Relations)
Nvidia kept the price tag on the deal under wraps, but according to an analyst quoted by Reuters, it’s pegged around $50 billion. The chipmaker confirmed the agreement covers CPUs intended to rival offerings from Intel and AMD. Ian Buck, a general manager at Nvidia, described Meta’s initial Vera tests as “very promising.” Reuters also noted Meta is building its own AI hardware and, separately, has been in talks with Google about using Tensor Processing Units for certain AI tasks. (Reuters)
Another cloud: Zuckerberg faces questioning in U.S. court for the first time this Wednesday, pressed on Instagram’s impact on teens’ mental health. The Los Angeles jury trial, probing claims of youth social media addiction, rolls ahead. Reuters notes the outcome could set the tone for thousands of similar lawsuits against Meta, Google’s YouTube, Snap, and TikTok. If Meta loses, damages are on the table. (Reuters)
The market isn’t unanimous here. Meta’s ramp-up in AI spending comes with its own set of risks: execution could falter, and the costs might get ahead of any short-term gains. Legal uncertainty also looms, as the sector faces unpredictable court outcomes and potentially steeper settlement bills.
Next, Nvidia’s quarterly numbers arrive Feb. 25, and investors will be combing through them for clues on where AI infrastructure demand stands, plus any signals on customer budgets—Meta’s in particular. (Nvidia)
