Meta reported another quarter that beat analyst expectations, with the company bringing in $40.6 billion in revenue, up 18 percent.
At the same time, the company is continuing to spend heavily on data centers as it builds ever larger AI training and inference clusters.
"We anticipate our full-year 2024 capital expenditures will be in the range of $38-40 billion, updated from our prior range of $37-40 billion," CFO Susan Li said, which primarily consists of data center, networking, and server spend.
"We continue to expect significant capital expenditures growth in 2025. Given this, along with the back-end weighted nature of our 2024 capital expenditures, we expect a significant acceleration in infrastructure expense growth next year as we recognize higher growth in depreciation and operating expenses of our expanded infrastructure fleet."
Capex for this quarter hit $9.2bn, up from $6.8bn last year, but down from $9.52bn the year before. 2023 saw a drop in capex spend as Meta paused around a dozen data center construction projects globally in December 2022 amid a “rescope” to accommodate AI-centric designs.
In its earnings call, some analysts pushed back at the heavy spend on data centers. "Part of the formula around kind of building out the infrastructures is maybe not what investors want to hear in the near term that we're growing that, but I just think that the opportunities here are really big," founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said.
"We're going to continue investing significantly in this. And I'm proud of the teams that are doing great work to stand up a large amount of capacity. So that way, we can deliver world-class models and world-class products."
Zuckerberg said that capacity allowed for record training clusters: “We're training the Llama 4 models on a cluster that is bigger than 100,000 H100s, or bigger than anything that I've seen reported for what others are doing."
Shares in Meta fell slightly, partially because of the growing spend, and partially because the number of daily users was worse than analysts expected.
