Investors punished Meta for its exorbitant artificial intelligence spending plans, which outstripped more restrained investment from Alphabet and Microsoft.<\/p>\n
Meta raised its capital expenditures for this year to between $70bn and $72bn, up from its previous guidance of $66bn to $72bn.<\/p>\n
The company also flagged that additions to its spending plans for 2026 would be \u201cnotably larger\u201d than the roughly $30bn it expects to add to capex budgets in 2025.<\/p>\n
Mark Zuckerberg defended the decision, telling analysts on a call that it was \u201cthe right strategy to aggressively frontload building capacity, so that way we\u2019re prepared for the most optimistic cases\u201d.<\/p>\n
Meta shares slid more than 8 per cent in after-hours trading on Wednesday. That equates to a market capitalisation wipeout of about $160bn, which would rank as the stock\u2019s second-biggest on record.<\/p>\n
Alphabet, meanwhile, reported better than forecast quarterly net income and revenue, which topped $100bn for the first time. Shares rose more than 6 per cent after the closing bell.<\/p>\n
Microsoft also reported revenue and net income that topped Wall Street\u2019s median forecast, but growth in its Azure cloud computing business fell short of the most bullish expectations.<\/p>\n
Hopes were high for a stronger result from the unit given the company\u2019s deal this week to supply more computing power to OpenAI. Microsoft\u2019s shares dipped 3.6 per cent.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Investors punished Meta for its exorbitant artificial intelligence spending plans, which outstripped more restrained investment from Alphabet and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":250020,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,105],"class_list":{"0":"post-250019","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-au","12":"tag-australia","13":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250019","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=250019"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250019\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/250020"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=250019"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=250019"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=250019"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}