Meta boosts 2025 spending up to $72 billion as AI race heats up

Meta said the number of daily active users across its family of apps, which includes Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads, averaged 3.43 billion for March 2025

Facebook parent Meta on April 30 raised its full-year capital expenditure forecast for 2025 to between $64 billion and $72 billion, up from the previous range of $60 billion to $65 billion, as the social networking giant looks to step up its artificial intelligence (AI) spending amid intensifying competition.

Meta stated that the higher capex reflects "additional data center investments to support our artificial intelligence efforts as well as an increase in the expected cost of infrastructure hardware". Majority of the capex this year will continue to go towards its core business, the company noted.

This development comes amid a rapidly escalating AI arms race as tech giants Google, OpenAI, Elon Musk's xAI, and Microsoft seek to outdo one another in debuting their next-generation frontier models and consumer offerings.

Google parent Alphabet also recently announced plans to invest around $75 billion in capital expenditures in 2025 while Microsoft plans to spend $80 billion in AI infrastructure this year.

"The major theme right now is how AI is transforming everything we do. As we continue to increase our investments and focus more of our resources on AI... the five major opportunities that we are focused on are improved advertising, more engaging experiences, business messaging, Meta AI and AI devices" Zuckerberg said during the earnings conference call on April 30.

He added that each of these opportunities are "long-term investments that are downstream from us building general intelligence and leading AI models and infrastructure."

Earlier this week, Meta launched a standalone app for its AI assistant Meta AI that now has nearly one billion monthly active users. The app comes with a new Discover feed that lets people share their AI prompts and explore how others are using the AI assistant. It also features a voice mode that makes the assistant more conversational in nature, similar to ChatGPT's Advanced Voice Mode or Google Gemini's Gemini Live.

During the earnings call, Zuckerberg said the company is focusing on deepening the Meta AI experience this year, with a goal of making it the "leading personal AI with an emphasis on personalisation, voice conversations, and entertainment".

"In the near future, I think that we're going to have content in our feeds that you can interact with and it will interact back with you rather than you just watching it," Zuckerberg said during the earnings call.

"As AI unlocks more productivity in the economy, I also expect that people will spend more of their time on entertainment and culture which will create an even larger opportunity to create more engaging experiences across all of these apps," he added.

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In April, Meta also unveiled Llama 4, the latest major release of its open AI model with native multimodal capabilities. Last week, the company also announced an API for its Llama models in limited preview that will help developers build Llama-powered services, tools, and applications.

Apart from this, Meta is also expanding its hardware ambitions with plans to make its Ray-Ban smart glasses available in several new markets like India, United Arab Emirates, and Mexico.

In January, Zuckerberg had said that the firm will invest "hundreds of billions of dollars" in AI infrastructure over the long term.

That said, Meta anticipates total expenses for 2025 to be in the range of $113 billion-$118 billion, lowered from the previous guidance of $114 billion-$119 billion.

The social networking giant reported revenue of $42.31 billion for the quarter, registering a 16 percent increase from the corresponding quarter last year. Its net income grew 35 percent to $16.6 billion.

Meta stated that the number of daily active users across its family of apps, which includes Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads, averaged 3.43 billion for March 2025, up 6 percent year-over-year.