Meta has been spending billions to lead in artificial intelligence. Now even the Silicon Valley giant, which is one of the world’s most valuable companies, is feeling the pressure of keeping up those investments.
On Wednesday, the company said it planned to continue spending on A.I. and raised the floor of its capital expenditures this year to $135 billion from $130 billion. The bulk of that money will go toward building new data centers, the computing facilities that power cutting-edge A.I.
But the moves have eaten into Meta’s cash. Its free cash flow, which is the money it had on hand after paying for expenses, turned negative for the three months ended Sept. 30, dropping to negative $2 billion. That was down from $784 million at the end of June and $8.55 billion in June 2025.
To alleviate the money pressures, Meta said it would issue a new class of stock in January. The move is intended to help the company have more ways to raise financing, pay employee compensation and buy other firms. It is also doing a two-for-one “stock split,” where its individual shares are divided up, lowering the company’s share price and increasing the total number of shares available to buy and sell.
“We are still developing our budget and capacity plans for next year, but we expect to continue investing aggressively to support both our core business and emerging A.I. initiatives,” Susan Li, Meta’s chief financial officer, said in a statement.
Meta faces cash strains even as it reported record quarterly sales driven by its online advertising business. Revenue for the third quarter was $64.6 billion, up 26 percent from a year earlier, while costs jumped 68 percent to $51.6 billion. Profit was $9.8 billion, up from $2.7 billion a year earlier when it was affected by a tax charge.
Meta has been trying to keep up in the A.I. race with rivals like Anthropic and OpenAI, which are also spending hundreds of billions for computing power. Meta’s spending totaled $39 billion in 2024 and $72 billion in 2025 and has since ballooned. It has also racked up debt, with its long-term debt totaling $80.9 billion last quarter, up from $58.7 billion a year earlier.
The company has also struck unconventional financing arrangements that do not appear on its balance sheet, like a $50 billion data center deal in Louisiana that was financed by private credit firms.
In the last few months, some A.I. investments have started paying off. The company released an A.I. agent called Muse last month that became the fastest growing A.I. app since OpenAI’s ChatGPT in 2022.
Joe Rennison contributed reporting.
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