Meta’s Zuckerberg gets green light from Wall Street to invest in AI

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg plans to increase his company’s artificial intelligence spending in 2026. Wall Street seems happy with this strategy.

While Meta broke both the top and bottom line in Wednesday’s fourth-quarter earnings report, it also revealed that AI-related capital spending this year will be between $115 billion and $135 billion. That’s nearly double what Meta spent on capex last year, when the company revamped its AI unit.

Although investors had previously expressed concern about Meta’s AI spending spree, they were pleased with the company’s latest results, which showed 24% year-on-year revenue growth driven by online advertising. Commodity stocks that have followed the market last year rose as much as 10% in after-hours trading.

“As we plan for the future, we will continue to make pivotal investments in infrastructure to train leading models and deliver personal superintelligence to billions of people and businesses around the world,” Zuckerberg told analysts during the earnings call.

Zuckerberg was talking about Meta’s ambitious data center builds, which aim to underpin both current and future AI projects.

Metafinance chief Susan Li told analysts the company remains “capacity constrained,” meaning it needs more computing power to further develop its core advertising business while also providing its AI team with the resources necessary to build more advanced models and products.

“Our teams have done a great job improving our infrastructure throughout 2025, but demands for computing resources across the company have grown faster than our supply,” Li said.

Zuckerberg said 2026 will be an important year for artificial intelligence, with investments aimed at supporting Meta’s mission to “create personal superintelligence.”

Whether Meta will have new AI products that can generate revenue remains an important question, and one Zuckerberg couldn’t answer clearly.

“So, we’ll be launching new products throughout the year,” Zuckerberg said during the call. “I think the important thing is that we’re not just starting one thing, we’re building a lot of things.”

Perhaps Zuckerberg’s biggest move last year was his $14.3 billion investment in Scale AI, which brought its founder and CEO Alexandr Wang and some of its top engineers and researchers to Meta. Wang leads Meta’s TBD AI unit, which is currently testing a new frontier model codenamed Avocado, which is intended to be a successor to the company’s Llama model family, CNBC reported.

“I expect our first models to be good, but more importantly, they will show the rapid trajectory we are on,” Zuckerberg said Wednesday. “And I expect us to steadily push the boundaries throughout the year as we continue to launch new models.”

When asked in the interview why Meta should develop its own powerful AI foundational model, Zuckerberg said it was important because Meta is a “deep technology company.”

Meta can’t risk being “limited to what others in the ecosystem have built or allowed us to build,” he said, adding that controlling a model will help you “shape the future of these products.”

Meanwhile, online advertising still accounts for the vast majority of Meta’s revenue. As long as this business continues to dominate mobile, beat expectations, and burn through billions of dollars in cash each quarter, Zuckerberg is likely to get plenty of leeway to pursue his AI goals.

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