Menlo Park, Calif., Feb 18, 2026, 02:21 PST
- Meta shares hardly budged in early premarket trade, with investors circling back to the company’s AI spending plans.
- Meta is now projecting capital expenditures of $115 billion to $135 billion for 2026—a notable jump over its 2025 plans.
- The company reported a 24% jump in fourth-quarter advertising revenue, reaching $58.1 billion.
Shares of Meta Platforms slipped just under 0.1% in early premarket action Wednesday, with investors weighing new commentary suggesting the Facebook parent remains able to bankroll a larger AI push. Last trade on the stock: $639.29.
Meta has put Wall Street on notice: capital expenditures are set to climb sharply — that means bigger outlays for data centers, chips, and other durable hardware. As the tech giants pour more money into AI, investors are showing nerves over the mounting costs.
Meta’s numbers still hinge on ads. Solid demand and stable prices give it breathing room to work on AI products. But any slip in either one cuts straight into margins and eats into free cash flow—the money left after operating expenses and capex.
Meta’s fourth-quarter numbers, out in late January, showed revenue climbing 24% to $59.9 billion, with advertising bringing in $58.1 billion—also up 24%. “We had strong business performance in 2025,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said. He added, “I’m looking forward to advancing personal superintelligence for people around the world in 2026.” 1
Zuckerberg, speaking on the earnings call, told analysts he expects 2026 to be the point when “AI starts to dramatically change the way we work,” with Meta stepping up infrastructure investment. CFO Susan Li noted a 6% climb in average price per ad, crediting stronger advertiser demand and “improved ad performance.” The company also said it “doubled the number of GPUs” powering its ads-ranking model. 2
Meta has been busy upgrading the core of its ad tech. In an engineering post from 2024, the company called Andromeda a machine-learning “retrieval” engine—it trims down tens of millions of ad options to just a few thousand before sorting them for the final cut. 3
Beyond its ad business, Meta has been backing its Llama large language models — these LLMs digest vast datasets to churn out or summarize both text and code. Reuters put out word that Meta rolled out the Llama 4 models in 2025, calling them multimodal systems equipped to process not just text, but also images, video, and audio. 4
TipRanks, in a report out Tuesday, called Meta’s main ad business “highly resilient”—but flagged higher execution risks tied to its AI spending spree. Analysts there see capital expenditures by 2026 possibly hitting $135 billion. They also cited an average 12-month price target of $852.42. 5
Lucas Ma, a Seeking Alpha contributor publishing as Envision Research, called the market’s response to Meta’s capex outlook an “overreaction.” He expects Meta’s free cash flow to average $35 billion across 2026 and 2027. Meta, he noted, is still a top pick for elite investors. 6
MarketMinute, in a separate commentary, said Meta’s AI strategy is already making itself felt in the ad numbers, highlighting both Andromeda and Llama 4 as key contributors to the uptick. 7
Heavy spending doesn’t leave much margin for error. If ad budgets shrink, privacy rules tighten, or Meta takes fresh hits in court, growth could stall—right when the company’s expenses are swelling. Reality Labs, the division focused on virtual and augmented reality, continues to rack up significant losses.
Meta is up against Alphabet in the fight for digital ad dollars. Microsoft and other major tech names are pushing deeper into AI infrastructure as well. Next up: Meta’s first-quarter numbers. The company is guiding revenue somewhere between $53.5 billion and $56.5 billion.
