Meta said Wednesday that it now expects its 2025 capital expenditure to range between $64 billion and $72 billion, a sharp step up from the $60 billion to $65 billion range it forecast just three months ago, and an astounding sum compared to the $28 billion in annual capex that Meta spent just two years ago in 2023.
“The pace of progress across the industry and the opportunities ahead for us are staggering,” Zuckerberg said on the company’s earnings call Wednesday, as he stressed Meta’s goal of developing an even more capable level of AI he called “full general intelligence.”
“I want to make sure that we’re working aggressively and efficiently and I also want to make sure that we are building out the leading infrastructure and teams to achieve our goals,” he said.
“To that end, we are accelerating some of our efforts to bring capacity online more quickly this year as well as some longer term projects that will give us the flexibility to add capacity in the coming years,” Zuckerberg said. “And that has increased our planned investment for this year.”
Meta said it expects Q2 revenue to range between $42.5 billion and $45.5 billion, which would represent year-on-year growth of between 9% and 16%. The average analyst expectation called for Q2 revenue of $43.81 billion.With the markets in turmoil amid the Trump-imposed tariffs and the recent report of slowing growth in the U.S. economy, it was not clear if Meta would provide a forecast for the second quarter.
Meta said some of its increased capex was due to “an increase in the expected cost of infrastructure hardware,” a reference to the tariffs imposed by the Trump administration on key components in data centers.
“The higher costs we expect to incur for infrastructure hardware this year really comes from suppliers who source from countries around the world,” Meta CFO Susan Li said on the call. “There’s just a lot of uncertainty around this given the ongoing trade discussions,” she said, noting that the company was trying to mitigate some of the cost increases by “optimizing our supply chain.”
Strong demand from advertisers—particularly from online retailers—in the first quarter drove a 16% increase in Meta’s revenue, while the company’s efforts keeping spending in check and share buybacks led to $6.43 in EPS, besting Wall Street’s EPS target of $5.22.
Alphabet re-affirmed its plans to spend $75 billion in capex this year as it pushes forward in the AI race.
