NEW YORK, Feb 11, 2026, 16:15 EST — After-hours
- Meta shares ended slightly lower as investors weighed a fresh $10 billion U.S. data center build-out tied to artificial intelligence.
- Bill Ackman’s Pershing Square disclosed a new Meta stake, framing the stock as an AI beneficiary despite spending worries.
- A German court ruling and fresh SEC paperwork added to a busy tape around the social media group.
Meta Platforms (META) shares edged down on Wednesday after the company said it was breaking ground on a $10 billion data center in Indiana to support its artificial intelligence push. The stock closed down 0.3% at $668.80, after trading between $657.65 and $679.23, while the tech-heavy Invesco QQQ ETF rose 0.3% and the SPDR S&P 500 ETF was flat.
The headline matters because investors have started to get picky about who gets rewarded for big AI bills. Data centers bring long lead times, big power needs and a lot of depreciation before they show up as revenue.
Meta has argued AI can lift engagement and ad results, but the market’s immediate question is simpler: how much cash goes out the door first. Even small, unrelated items can tug at sentiment when the numbers are that large.
Meta said the Indiana facility is designed for 1 gigawatt of capacity — a measure of power load — which U.S. grid operators equate to roughly 800,000 homes. Rachel Peterson, the company’s vice president for data centers, told Reuters the site in Lebanon, Indiana, should come online at the end of 2027 or early 2028 and that Meta was “paying our own way” for related energy upgrades; she also said, “We’re going to be pushing a lot of capacity through construction very quickly at this site.” (Reuters)
A few hours later, billionaire investor Bill Ackman disclosed his hedge fund bought Meta shares late last year, putting roughly 10% of Pershing Square’s capital — about $2 billion — into the position. The firm wrote in a presentation seen by Reuters that Meta’s share price “underappreciates” the company’s long-term upside from AI, even as it acknowledged investor concern about how much the company is spending on AI initiatives. (Reuters)
A separate Form 144 filing showed Meta’s Jennifer Newstead proposed selling 515 shares of Class A stock, with an aggregate market value listed at about $349,057, and the filing said the sales would be made under a Rule 10b5-1 plan — a pre-set trading program often used by insiders to reduce concerns about trading on nonpublic information. (SEC)
In Europe, a German court ruled that Meta subsidiary Edge Network Services must pay Deutsche Telekom about 30 million euros for network services tied to traffic from Meta platforms, according to a court spokesperson. Meta said it fundamentally disagreed; the dispute centers on “peering points” — where data enters a network — and the court said Edge can file a complaint with Germany’s federal court of justice within a month after receiving the judgment. (Reuters)
But there are clear ways this can go sideways. If power constraints or local pushback slow data-center timelines, or if spending keeps rising faster than investors expect, the stock can lose altitude even if the ad business stays solid. Legal and regulatory fights can also flare up at awkward times, and those bills tend to be hard to model.
What traders are watching next is less about Wednesday’s close and more about the next set of headlines that test confidence. Instagram chief Adam Mosseri was set to testify on Wednesday in a Los Angeles trial over whether the app’s design harmed young users, and Meta said it “strongly disagree[s]” with the allegations; CEO Mark Zuckerberg is expected to testify in the coming weeks. (Reuters)
