From Yahoo Finance, October 30:
Meta (META) stock took a beating on Thursday after the company said during its third quarter earnings report that it plans to further hike AI spending for the rest of this year and in 2026.
Shares of Meta fell more than 11% midday as Wall Street analysts and investors digested the news.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg summed up the spending plan as a means to keep up with the demand for AI, but he said that if the company overbuilds, it can absorb the extra computing capacity in the future.
"We keep on seeing this pattern where we build some amount of infrastructure to what we think is an aggressive assumption, and then we keep on having more demand to be able to use more compute, especially in the core business," Zuckerberg explained.
"I mean, it's, of course, possible to overshoot that right?" he added. "And if we do … then, you know, we see that there's just a lot of demand for other new things that we'd build internally, externally … almost every week, people come to us from outside the company, asking us to stand up an API [application programming interface] service or asking if we have different compute that they could get from us, and we haven't done that yet."
In a worst-case scenario where Meta builds too much capacity that goes unused, Zuckerberg said it would mean the company simply prebuilt what it will need in the future, though it would also have to contend with some losses and depreciation.
That's not exactly what Wall Street wanted to hear, though....
....MUCH MORE
The stock is down $81.81 at $669.86
And at Bloomberg:
Meta to Sell $30 Billion of Bonds in Year’s Biggest Offering
Earlier:
"Meta Tumbles, Microsoft Slides, Alphabet Soars After Mag 7 Earnings Deluge" (GOOG; META; MSFT)
For some reason I keep thinking of this from January:
Climateer Line Of The Day: Microsoft CEO Edition (MSFT; ORCL; ARM; ELON)
Comparing Stargate with financing for his own AI infrastructure buildout plans:
“Look, all I know is, I’m good for my $80 billion,” said Nadella, laughing.
