Meta’s AI spending plans point to a bigger Big Tech capex race

Meta is spending on AI like the bill will never come due. The company’s 2026 capital expenditure guidance sits between $130 billion and $145 billion, up from the $72 billion it spent in 2025. At the top of the range, Meta would roughly double last year’s outlay in a single year. Where the money is going Most of the new spending targets AI infrastructure. Over $100 billion is estimated to be earmarked for that bucket in 2026. The list covers three things: data centers, custom silicon chips, and energy deals. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has indicated Meta is willing to put between $100 billion and $200 billion into AI infrastructure with no guarantee that its models will succeed. The energy side of the plan is just as large. Meta has secured 6.5 GW of nuclear power contracts running through 2035. Those contracts feed major compute clusters under construction. In Ohio, a site called Prometheus is expected to exceed 1 GW, while in Louisiana, a project called Hyperion is slated to scale to 5 GW. Big Tech is spending in formation Meta is not acting alone. The five largest US cloud and AI infrastructure providers, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Oracle, are collectively guiding toward $660...