The boom in investment in artificial intelligence is facing serious questions, judging by the market reaction to Meta\u2019s latest set of results. The company behind Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, shed over $100 billion in its value as investors took fright at the level of investment in AI it plans for the next few years.<\/p>\n
Meta\u2019s performance was strong. Revenue for the three months from July to September of this year was $64.6 billion, up 26 per cent from a year earlier, while profit was $9.8 billion, up from $2.7 billion for the same period in 2025.<\/p>\n
However, even though the company is generating record levels of revenue, it is running out of cash because of the extent of its investment in AI. It has raised its capital expenditure target for 2026 to at least $135 billion, most of which is earmarked for data centres and building out its AI infrastructure.<\/p>\n
It plans to raise hundreds of billions of dollars in new share sales and borrowings over the next few years to maintain robust levels of investment in AI. In other words, one of the most valuable companies in the world is effectively becoming a one-way bet on the AI boom.<\/p>\n
Yet, instead of urging caution, US president Donald Trump and his administration have fanned the AI boom. Scott Bessent, the US treasury secretary, told investors after the negative market reaction to Meta\u2019s results that he did not see a \u201csystemic problem\u201d with the AI investment cycle.<\/p>\n
Increasing investment in AI comes at a time when there are growing calls, even from prominent figures within the industry, for greater regulation amid warnings about the threats it poses. But with US economic growth reliant on AI investment, the Trump administration will not be inclined to agree to a global rules-based system, or anything that could hinder its growth.<\/p>\n
There is no doubt that the AI frenzy has many of the characteristics of a bubble, including heady market valutions. But if it bursts the fallout will not be confined to the stock market .<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The boom in investment in artificial intelligence is facing serious questions, judging by the market reaction to Meta\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":666438,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[220,218,219,113,6285,61,60,589,131,282303,80],"class_list":["post-666437","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-economy","tag-horizontal","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-market","tag-stocks","tag-stocks-money-stock-exchange-wall-street","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/666437","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=666437"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/666437\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/666438"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=666437"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=666437"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=666437"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}