New York, February 25, 2026, 16:30 (ET) — After-hours
- Meta shares rose about 2% in regular trading and were little changed after the bell
- A new AMD supply deal gives Meta long-term access to AI chips and a warrant tied to shipments
- The White House is lining up Big Tech and energy firms for a March 4 pledge on data-center power costs
Meta Platforms shares rose 2.3% to $653.83 on Wednesday and were up 0.05% at $654.02 in after-hours trading, as investors digested fresh details around the company’s AI infrastructure push. (Investing)
The stock has become a quick read on a bigger fight: how far Big Tech will go to lock up chips and electricity, and how long markets will tolerate the spending before demanding payback. Meta’s ad business still throws off cash, but the AI buildout is now the story that keeps getting repriced.
That is playing out in Washington, too. The White House said it will host major data-center companies and energy producers on March 4 and ask them to sign a voluntary pledge aimed at keeping electricity affordable as demand from AI facilities climbs. (Reuters)
On the supply side, Meta’s newest chip deal sits right in the middle of the industry’s scramble for capacity. Advanced Micro Devices said it will sell up to $60 billion worth of AI chips to Meta over five years, and the agreement covers six gigawatts of compute, starting with one gigawatt of AMD’s MI450 hardware expected in the second half of 2026. Reuters reported one gigawatt is roughly enough to power about 750,000 homes, a rough yardstick of just how power-hungry this wave is. (Reuters)
A core wrinkle is the equity sweetener. An AMD filing showed the chipmaker issued Meta a performance-based warrant to buy up to 160 million AMD shares at $0.01 per share, vesting in tranches as shipment milestones are met and subject to AMD stock-price hurdles that escalate to $600 per share for the final tranche. A warrant is a right to buy stock later at a set price, and here it effectively ties Meta’s supply deal to AMD’s market value. (SEC)
Meta and AMD both framed it as long-haul industrial planning, not a one-quarter trade. “We’re excited to form a long-term partnership with AMD to deploy efficient inference compute and deliver personal superintelligence,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, using “inference” to mean the computing used when an AI model generates answers for users. AMD CEO Lisa Su said the companies were expanding their partnership as Meta pushes AI “at unprecedented scale.” (AMD)
Some investors are less interested in the marketing words than the structure. Reuters’ Breakingviews column quoted Gadjo Sevilla, an analyst at eMarketer, calling it part of an emerging “closed-loop hyperscaler” pattern where mega-cap AI customers swap commitments for access to scarce hardware. Dan Coatsworth, head of markets at AJ Bell, said the “return of circular transactions” gives investors “something else to worry about.” (Reuters)
The market has been jumpy around anything tied to the AI supply chain, even on days the indexes are calm. On Tuesday, when AMD announced the Meta deal, Meta shares “inched 0.3% higher,” Reuters reported, while AMD jumped. (Reuters)
Meta still carries the older, messier risks as well. A court filing in a New Mexico case made public this month showed internal Meta warnings that encrypting Messenger could reduce the company’s ability to flag child-exploitation cases; former content policy head Monika Bickert wrote in a 2019 chat, “We are about to do a bad thing as a company. This is so irresponsible.” Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said the company built additional safety features before rolling out default end-to-end encryption in 2023. (Reuters)
In markets more broadly, traders have been trying to separate near-term disruption fears from longer-term optimism about AI. “AI will continue to disrupt the world but I don’t think it’s the end of the world,” Ken Polcari, chief market strategist at Slatestone Wealth, said in a Reuters report on Wednesday’s tech trade. (Reuters)
Meta also added a calendar marker for investors. The company said CFO Susan Li will participate in the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference on March 4 at 11:30 a.m. Pacific, with a webcast on its investor relations site. (Meta Investor)
But the downside case is sitting in plain sight: bigger capex, tighter power markets, and a louder political debate about who pays for the grid upgrades. Investors have also been blunt that AI could upend business models faster than it boosts profits; “the disruption concerns are more acute right now than worries over return on investment,” Horizon Investments’ Zach Hill said in a Reuters market report. (Reuters)
Next up is the market’s reaction to Nvidia’s results, which options traders were pricing for a roughly 5.6% post-earnings swing, and then the March 4 double-header: the White House power pledge and Meta’s CFO appearance at Morgan Stanley. (Reuters)
