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 will go toward building 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 that ended Sept. 30, dropping to negative $2.12 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 will 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 will also do a two-for-one “stock split,” the company said, dividing up individual shares to lower their price and increase the number available to buy and sell. That could help make Meta’s shares more attractive to buyers.
“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 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 in the third quarter, up from $58.7 billion a year earlier.
To fuel its A.I. data centers, Meta has struck some unconventional 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.
Some A.I. investments have started paying off. The company released an A.I. agent called Muse last month, and it became the fastest-growing A.I. app since OpenAI’s ChatGPT in 2022. Muse has surpassed 10.5 million downloads since its release on Sept. 8.
This month, Meta also introduced A.I. models that it said performed nearly as strongly as those from Anthropic and OpenAI, although they still trailed on coding ability. While the company has focused on building A.I. for its billions of users, Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, has said his company still aims to sell its A.I. to other companies, a market dominated by Anthropic and OpenAI.
(The New York Times has sued OpenAI, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The company has denied the suit’s claims.)
Meta is increasing its A.I. spending amid growing anxieties over whether the giant sums are sustainable and can generate major returns. Prices for bonds offered by companies building data centers, like CoreWeave and Oracle, fell this month, with investors worried about whether those companies could meet their financial obligations.
For Meta, the spending forecast was not surprising, “especially since they’ve now gotten traction on the consumer A.I. front with Muse,” said Andrew Rocco, an analyst at Zacks, a research firm.
“Zuckerberg has shown that he’s all in on winning this race,” Mr. Rocco added. “It wouldn’t surprise me if they continued to raise it.”
Meta also paid a one-time legal charge of $9.9 billion in the quarter, tied to its ongoing battle against lawsuits that accuse it of promoting social media addiction. In August, the company reached a $17.1 billion settlement with 47 states over claims its platforms harmed young people.
On Wednesday, a New Mexico judge separately ordered the company to pay $25 billion to the state for deceiving users about its data privacy practices.
Mr. Zuckerberg said A.I. continued to improve Meta’s core advertising business, which accounts for nearly all of its revenue. Its family of apps also grew to 3.64 billion daily users, up 3 percent from a year earlier.
The Reality Labs division, which develops smart glasses that have a camera and an A.I. assistant, generated $443 million in revenue, down 6 percent from a year earlier. The division lost $4.1 billion, about the same as a year earlier.
Joe Rennison contributed reporting from New York.
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