Meta’s AI Investments May Not Fuel New Developments, Says Zuck

Key Insights

• Investment: Meta plans to invest $72 billion in AI infrastructure by 2025.
• Core Business: Advertising remains the primary revenue source for Meta’s social media platforms.
• AI Deployment: Meta’s current AI applications have not significantly transformed its social media functions.
• Future Spending: Zuckerberg indicates that 2026 will see even higher AI-related expenses than 2025.

You know how Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, is spending $72 billion on AI infrastructure in 2025? Well, with his company’s stock in the middle of a vertigo-inducing plunge of about 8% on Wednesday afternoon—a signal that investors are getting worried—CEO Mark Zuckerberg conjured a vision of a world where Meta doesn’t end up using all that stuff for its intended purpose in the near future, saying it would be fine.

That infrastructure Meta is investing in is intended to come in handy if AI superintelligence is achieved soon, Zuckerberg said on an earnings call Wednesday. “If it takes longer, then we’ll use the extra compute to accelerate our core business, which continues to be able to profitably use much of the compute,” Zuckerberg said, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Meta’s “core business” remains ad-subsidized social media apps. Advertising accounts for almost all of its revenue, according to its own financial disclosures from earlier this year.

It’s not as though Meta has not deployed AI in its social media apps. (Who can forget the tragic case of “Big sis Billie”?) But the basic functions of Meta’s platforms have not exactly been revolutionized by AI, unless you count all those people who now post things like Shrimp Jesus on Facebook. With that in mind, might billions of dollars spent on data center construction, expensive AI experts, and an entire GPU company be overkill, assuming it’s just to “accelerate” Facebook and Instagram?

And those AI expenses aren’t about to shrink next year. Zuckerberg also told investors to expect 2026 to be even spendier than 2025.

“I think it’s the right strategy to aggressively front-load building capacity,” he said, according to the Journal. “That way, if superintelligence arrives sooner, we will be ideally positioned for a generational paradigm shift in many large opportunities.”

The worst case scenario for Meta, Mark Zuckerberg says, is that it might have to “slow building new infrastructure for some period while we grow into what we build.”

Gizmodo reached out to Meta for comment, and will update if we hear back.