Meta spends $34.91B on AI infrastructure in third quarter

Meta spent $34.91 billion on data center construction and AI chips in the third quarter, the company said in its earnings report on October 21, according to digitaltoday.co.kr. The company also raised the lower end of its full-year capital expenditure outlook to $135 billion.

Meta was the first of the large technology companies building AI infrastructure to disclose quarterly results and future investment plans. Its third-quarter revenue beat market expectations on strong advertising.

CFO Susan Li said AI investment is already increasing advertising revenue.

Alphabet and Microsoft are scheduled to report third-quarter results on October 28, and Amazon on October 29.

Earlier investment disclosures

Earlier, Alphabet said it spent about 60% of its second-quarter technology infrastructure investment on servers, while Microsoft said most of its April-June investment went to short-term assets such as GPUs and CPUs. Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta have all said demand exceeds supply capacity. In July, Alphabet forecast that next year's capital expenditure would rise significantly, and Microsoft said its capital expenditure for the July-September quarter would exceed $50 billion. Nvidia projected that capital expenditure by the top five cloud companies would reach $1.3 trillion next year.