On Wednesday the company said it expects its capital expenditure for 2026 to be between $115 billion and $135 billion

Instagram-owner Meta on Wednesday boosted its capital spending plans for this year by 73% in the pursuit of “superintelligence,” an effort to offer deeply personalized ​artificial intelligence to its large social media user base.

Shareholders backed CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s ambitious capital outlay, boosting Meta stock 10% in extended trading, as the company ‌posted a 24% surge in advertising revenue – its mainstay – for the quarter ended December 31. It also forecast first-quarter revenue above Wall Street expectations.

This is going to be a big year for delivering personal superintelligence, accelerating our business infrastructure for the future and shaping how our company will work going forward, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on a conference call with analysts.

On Wednesday the company said it expects its capital expenditure for 2026 to be between $115 billion and $135 billion. That was driven largely by infrastructure costs including payments made to third-party cloud providers – such as Google – higher depreciation of its AI data ‌centre assets, and higher infrastructure operating expenses.

This compares with expectations of a $109.9 billion capex budget, according to Visible Alpha, and $72.22 billion Meta spent ​last year.

Meta, a late entrant to the AI race, has doubled down with a target of achieving superintelligence, a theoretical milestone where machines outthink humans. To that end, it has pledged to spend to build several massive AI data centres for superintelligence and is planning for bigger financial outlays to meet soaring compute needs.

It has funded the steep ‍AI-related bills with its advertising business, where revenue soared to $58.14 billion in the fourth quarter, up from $46.78 billion a year earlier. Capex rose by 49%, outpacing fourth-quarter total revenue growth of 24%, fuelling a 7-percentage point decline in operating margin.