Mark Zuckerberg says Meta committed as much as $200B to AI infrastructure before anyone could tell him it would work, with his chief AI officer saying it was not clear at all. Meta’s free cash flow fell 91% in the second quarter.
Mark Zuckerberg says Meta committed to spending as much as $200B on AI infrastructure before anyone at the company could tell him it would work. He put the figure at $100B or $200B.
He asked chief AI officer Alexandr Wang whether he was sure, Bloomberg reported, and Wang’s answer was that it was not clear at all that it was going to work.
The candour has arrived in stages. In April, asked when the spending would return anything, Zuckerberg called it a very technical question.
Chief financial officer Susan Li kept warning that the cost of failure would be enormous. Zuckerberg told Wang that Li had scared him a little.
By July the answer had changed. He told staff that agentic development had not accelerated as expected, and that the bets had not come to fruition.
Revenue was not the problem. It rose 28% to $60.8B, while profit fell 14% and capital spending guidance moved to between $130B and $145B, against $72B last year.
Cash was. Meta’s free cash flow fell 91% in the second quarter, to $784M from $8.55B a year earlier.
Not all the spending sits on the balance sheet. A Nikkei study puts Meta’s off-balance-sheet debt at about $420B, with $27B of it attached to one Louisiana data centre.
Alphabet, by contrast, publishes a number. It disclosed $811B of contracted future spending at the end of June, up about $500B in a single quarter.
Meta has disclosed no comparable total. So the $100B or $200B Zuckerberg named on a podcast is his own figure, not one investors can check in a filing.
The IMF raised the same shape of risk this week. It called the revenue commitments behind these deals wrong-way risk, because the investment sours exactly when the promised revenue does.
Europe is exposed through the market rather than the spending. The fund says the euro area and Britain are less sensitive than advanced Asia, but hold far more US shares than before.
The next test is 21 October, when Meta reports third-quarter results after the close. The stock is up more than 12% this year, and fell 8% after the last report.