Investing too aggressively raises concerns? Meta's stock price plunged by 10%, Zuckerberg's AI spending plan triggers market unease.

Meta delivered impressive results in its latest financial report, with adjusted earnings per share reaching $7.25 and revenue of $51.24 billion, a year-on-year increase of 26%, far exceeding Wall Street expectations. However, this good news could not offset market concerns about its massive AI investment plan. During Thursday's trading session, Meta's stock price fell more than 10%, indicating that investors are anxious about the scale of its future capital expenditures.

Spending money on AI, Meta expects to invest up to $72 billion next year.

In the fierce competition for the AI market against tech giants like Google and Microsoft, Meta has significantly raised its capital expenditure expectations for 2025. According to the latest forecast, next year's capital expenditure will range between $70 billion and $72 billion, up from the previous upper limit of $66 billion to $72 billion.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg defended this wave of major spending during the earnings call, stating: “Although we are still in the early stages, we have already seen returns from our core business, which gives us more confidence in making significant investments. We want to ensure that we are not under-investing.”

“The Era of 'Super Intelligence' Has Arrived? Meta Prepares in Advance”

Zuckerberg further explained that Meta is “actively” expanding its AI infrastructure in advance to welcome the era of “superintelligence” that he speaks of. He believes this will be “a generational paradigm shift,” and Meta is expected to take a leading position in it.

Earlier this year, Meta invested $14.3 billion in the AI startup Scale AI and successfully recruited the company's CEO Alexandr Wang, who will co-lead a new AI division called “Superintelligence Labs” alongside former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman. In addition, Meta has also signed multiple cloud contracts to expand its AI computing capabilities.

The competitors have gone crazy! Google and Microsoft are ramping up to look at $93 billion.

Meta is not the only tech giant betting heavily on AI. Google's parent company Alphabet also announced on the same day that it is raising its capital expenditure estimate for 2025 to between $91 billion and $93 billion, while Microsoft expects significant growth in its spending this fiscal year.

It is worth mentioning that Meta's books this season also reflect a tax expense of up to 15.93 billion USD, resulting from the tax reform adjustments caused by President Trump's “One Big Beautiful Bill Act.”

Although Zuckerberg is full of confidence in the future prospects of AI, judging from this stock price reaction, investors still maintain a wait-and-see attitude regarding whether Meta can profit from this AI race.

Is this article too aggressive in its investment? Meta's stock price plummeted by 10%, and Zuckerberg's AI spending plan has caused market unrest. First appeared in Chain News ABMedia.