Mark Zuckerberg has got that dawg compute in him.

Meta just got the all-clear from Wall Street to keep lighting money on fire (sorry) investing aggressively in AI, and this time nobody’s asking him to slow down.

Zuck’s new earnings report seems to have earned himself a full hall pass to keep shoveling money into AI furnaces, and for the first time in this saga, nobody’s waving the “discipline” sign. After yesterday’s close, Meta posted $8.88 in EPS on $59.9B in revenue and absolutely destroyed expectations (in a good way). Immediately shares jumped 10%. As usual, ads printing cash proved to be the most effective argument in the room.

And once the ad machine is humming? Zuck reaches for the checkbook.

Meta now says 2026 capex will land between $115B and $135B, nearly double last year’s spend (you know, when everyone in their brother was calling him irresponsible).

“We will continue to invest very significantly in infrastructure to train leading models and deliver personal super intelligence to billions of people.” -Mark Zuckerberg, calmly describing his new $130B science experiment

(Source: Yahoo Finance)

Analysts used to flinch every time Zuck said the words infrastructure or long-term. But this time, there seems to be no panic. That’s because Meta’s core ad business is still an absolute unit, up 24% YoY, throwing off billions in free cash like it’s nothing.

Translation: as long as Instagram keeps selling dopamine and CPMs, Zuck can apply for as many AI credit cards as he wants.

Meta CFO Susan Li admitted the company is “capacity constrained.” What she meant to say is “we literally cannot buy GPUs fast enough.” Between ads, AI models, and Superintelligence Labs, Meta is chewing through compute faster than Nvidia can crank it out. Yes, that’s a real thing now.

Zuckerberg’s big swing last year (the $14.3B Scale AI deal) brought founder Alexandr Wang into the building to run Meta’s next-gen AI unit. Their new frontier model (code-named Avocado, because of course) is positioned as the successor to Llama… assuming it ever ships on time.

(Source: GuruFocus)

That’s the risk. Because for all the spending, Meta still hasn’t clearly answered the most important question: What actually makes money?

Zuck’s answer on the call was essentially: “A lot of things. Eventually.”

Meanwhile, rivals like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon are also dumping truckloads of cash into data centers, turning the AI race into a capital arms war where the only rule is whoever blinks first loses.

Of course, it’s not all hunky dory. Reality Labs dropped another $6B loss, the metaverse continues its long residency in beta purgatory, Llama 4 Behemoth missed its timeline, and the company is flirting with making future models proprietary… clearly tiptoeing away from its open-weights kumbaya era.

Oh, and regulators are still out on their witch hunt as well.The FTC is appealing its antitrust loss (the same case where it tried to argue Meta bought Instagram and WhatsApp to wipe out future competition) and, apparently, decided one loss wasn’t enough. At the same time, countries like Australia are openly talking about banning social media for kids under 16, which wouldn’t exactly be great news for ad dollars.

But none of that mattered after earnings dropped.

Because for now, ads are still cashing in on everyone’s Instagram addiction, margins are intact, and Wall Street has decided that if someone’s going to light $135B on AI, it might as well be Meta.

Against all odds, Zuck’s strategy seems to be working. Just hope you’re excited to have a data center in your backyard very soon.

At the time of publishing this article, Stocks.News holds positions in Meta, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon as mentioned in the article.