Meta increased its capital expenditure for the year as AI data center costs rise.

The company said that it planned to spend $130 billion to $145bn this year, up from $115bn-$135bn at the start of this year and $125bn-$145bn in April. This week, Amazon also increased capex guidance by $20bn, citing the cost of memory for AI servers.

While investors were forgiving of Amazon's increased expenditure, with shares jumping, they were less kind to Meta.

Shares fell around ten percent, as Meta's free cash flow for the quarter hit its lowest level in the past five years, at $784 million. This time last year, free cash flow was $8.5bn.

“I get that this is a big investment and it’s a big bet,” CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg said in an earnings call. “We see the technology working. We’re happy with the trajectory of the lab. I’m excited about the products that are coming. And we believe that this is going to be a big thing.”

The company again confirmed that it was interested in becoming a cloud provider, with Zuckerberg noting that the company was “getting a lot of offers for compute at a significant premium over what we paid for it.”

Meta is reportedly in early talks to rent its compute to Anthropic in a deal that could be worth as much as $10bn. It recently hired AWS cloud lead David Brown as it prepares for its cloud push.

For the quarter, Meta reported revenues of $61bn, up 28 percent, and profits of $6bn, down 14 percent. The company forecast third-quarter revenue of between $61bn and $64bn, with the midpoint below Wall Street expectations of $63.1bn.