Meta posts first negative free cash flow in over a decade as AI spending soars

Meta Platforms just spent more money than its business brought in. For a company that has printed cash for over ten years, that is a genuinely unusual sentence to write. The social media giant reported negative free cash flow of $2.12 billion for the third quarter of 2026, its first quarterly dip below zero in over a decade. The culprit is no mystery: an aggressive push to build out artificial intelligence infrastructure. The math behind the red ink For the quarter ending September 30, Meta generated $32.79 billion in operating cash flow. Capital expenditures, however, came in at $34.91 billion. The gap between those two figures is exactly where the negative $2.12 billion comes from. Most of that spending went toward data centers and compute capacity. In plain terms, Meta is buying the chips, buildings and power needed to train and run increasingly large AI models. Revenue rose 26% year-over-year to $64.60 billion, ahead of analyst estimates of roughly $63.37 billion. Wall Street shrugs, then cheers Shares rose approximately 4% in after-hours trading following the report. The strong revenue performance and progress on AI, including new models like Muse, apparently outweighed any co...