Meta's big bet on "superintelligence"
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What significant expenditure is Meta planning for this year?
Meta revs its engine in the AI race. For American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Stephanie Hughes.
Meta anticipates spending $135 billion in capital expenditures this year. That's nearly double what it was in 2025. One driver of that growth is what Meta calls its superintelligence lapse. This kind of spending puts it right up there with other tech giants pouring money into their AI capabilities. And it's a shift from a company that used to be very focused on virtual reality. I talked about this with Mike Isaac, a reporter for the New York Times.
What they talked about in their last earnings call was the idea that their AI is improving their advertising targeting. They're getting smarter at giving you the exact right ad, quote unquote, right ad that you want to see at the right time, which means they're making more money from serving you those ads. So they're making something like 20% more revenue than they had the previous year, which for a company that already makes more than $100 billion a year in revenue, is a big increase yeah i mean they were already pretty good at targeting ads towards us and posts and things like that ai could make it even better i think so i think that's the thing they're stressing when you and i like look at these numbers for data center expenditures which is just i like i can't even fathom how much 120 billion dollars is right
They have this chatbot, Meta AI, and like not that many people use it compared to, say, ChatGPT. So I think it doesn't get that much attention, but they do have these other uses. I will say that the other thing they're doing now is trying, you know, sort of haltingly to put AI into their Ray-Ban smart glasses. Okay. The idea being... Yeah, exactly. So just in case you wanted that. The idea being you have a smart assistant on your face at all times that you can ask to identify things in the real world or give you directions or help you cook a recipe or something like that.
In its most recent earnings call, Meta mentioned building personal superintelligence. Tell me what that is, besides frightening.
Yeah. Meta, they have their own kind of what are called open source models of AI, but they're not quite on par with some of the more cutting edge parts of the industry. And they really need a product that to differentiate themselves between all of their competitors. Why would you go to Meta for AI when you could use ChatGPT, essentially? And so this idea that Mark Zuckerberg has of personal superintelligence is that idea that, hey, maybe you're wearing a pair of Meta Ray-Bans and you need to get directions to downtown San Francisco to go see something at the opera house. Instead of doing a Google or getting on Google Maps or something, you could be driving in your car and say, hey, Meta, tell me how to get to the opera house from here.
And it's going to give you directions. I would argue he's kind of trying to find use cases for it right now. And that would be this idea of personal superintelligence just because of the sheer amount of information of how much Facebook and Instagram and all these apps already know about us, basically.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think you're getting at this, but what advantages does Meta have as it rushes to build these AI tools?
I mean, look, I report on the company, so I'm probably like two on it, but they know a lot about me, you know? And that's not necessarily me explicitly telling them all about my life, but if I do a search for... the latest guitar that I've been thinking about lately or like I'm, they can figure out over time that I probably like looking at guitars, which is unfortunately correct. And I buy a lot of stuff because of that. And so imagine literal decades at this point of compiled information on your life. What can they do with that? How can they use AI to, you know, use things they know about you and, and, provide whatever services or different ways of interacting with the world. They would say that's their positive way of looking at it.
I'm not sure everyone feels the same way, but that is, I would say one of the built-in advantages competitively that they have.
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