Meta revs its engine in the AI race.

From 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,

you know, 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 is, right? They have this chatbot, meta-a-I, and like not that many people use it

compared to, say, chat GPT.

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 Rayban smart glasses.

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