Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg plans more aggressive AI spending in Superintelligence push

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg

Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg plans to invest even more aggressively in artificial intelligence (AI) to establish the social networking giant as the leading frontier AI lab amid a rapidly escalating AI arms race with rivals like OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft.

The company, which reported its third-quarter results on October 29, raised its full-year capital expenditure forecast for 2025 to between $70 billion and $72 billion, up from the previous range of $66 billion to $72 billion. It added that capital expenditures would be "notably larger in 2026 than 2025.”

The firm also expects total expenses to be in the range of $116 billion to $118 billion, up from the earlier range of $114 billion to $118 billion, reflecting year-over-year growth of 22 to 24 percent.

The increase is also driven by rising employee compensation as a result of the company's aggressive AI hiring spree, during which it offered billion-dollar pay packages to lure top researchers from rivals including OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and Apple.

Rising investor concerns

The move, however, has sparked fresh concerns among investors about the potential returns on the billions of dollars being poured into AI infrastructure and talent acquisition, sending the company's stock down as much as 9 percent on October 29.

During the company's third-quarter earnings call on October 29, Zuckerberg defended the surging AI spend to support building "personal superintelligence for everyone" through Meta Superintelligence Labs. Superintelligence is regarded as AI that surpasses human intelligence in all aspects.

“I think it’s the right strategy to aggressively front-load building capacity so that we’re prepared for the most optimistic cases,” Zuckerberg said. “That way, if superintelligence arrives sooner, we’ll be ideally positioned for a generational paradigm shift and many large opportunities.”

He added that if development takes longer, Meta could use the additional compute to accelerate the company's core business which "continues to be able to profitably use much more compute than we’ve been able to throw at it"

In a worst-case scenario, Zuckerberg noted, “we would just slow building new infrastructure for some period while we grow into what we build.”

"We're seeing the returns in the core business. That's giving us a lot of confidence that we should be investing a lot more. And we want to make sure that we're not under investing," he said.

Read: Meta to pour hundreds of billions into AI infrastructure as Zuckerberg shrugs off DeepSeek threat

Meta's AI strategy revamp

Meta has reset its AI strategy in recent months following a series of setbacks, including the disappointing performance of its flagship AI model Llama 4, delays in launching more-advanced AI models and the departure of several top researchers.

The company invested $14.3 billion in data-labeling startup Scale AI for a 49 percent stake in June and appointed its CEO, Alexandr Wang, as chief AI officer. Meta also restructured its AI division and established Meta Superintelligence Labs, which brings together the firm’s foundation models, product, and Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) teams, along with a new lab focused on developing the next generation of its AI models.

Earlier this month, the social networking giant also poached Andrew Tulloch, co-founder of Thinking Machines Lab, the startup founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati.

"Meta Superintelligence Labs is off to a strong start. We have already built the lab with the highest talent density in the industry. We're heads down developing our next generation of models and products," Zuckerberg said in the earnings call.

Last week, Meta however laid off around 600 people from its AI division, in a bid to operate more nimbly. The company's recent AI hires were not affected by these job cuts.

Meta Q3 financial performance

Meta reported revenue of $51.2 billion for the quarter, registering a 26 percent increase from the corresponding quarter last year. Net income fell 83 percent to $2.7 billion, due to a one-time income tax charge of $15.93 billion as a result of the implementation of US president Donald Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

The number of daily active users across Meta's family of apps, which includes Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads, averaged 3.54 billion for October 2025, up 8 percent year-over-year.