Meta's free cash flow turns negative as it raises 2026 AI capex guidance to $135–145 billion

AI spending now exceeds the cash Meta's business produces. Q3 2026 capex reached $34.9 billion and free cash flow fell to −$2.1 billion, from +$10.6 billion a year earlier, while revenue grew 26% to $64.6 billion. Meta raised its 2026 capex range from $115–135 billion in January to $135–145 billion, against $72.2 billion spent in 2025. With $85.8 billion spent so far this year, that range implies roughly $49–59 billion in Q4 alone. Shares fell nearly 7% after the results. [2] [4] [13] [7]

Meta is covering the gap with more than operating cash. The Hyperion campus in Louisiana, which exceeds 2 GW, is financed through a roughly $27 billion joint venture that is about 80% owned by Blue Owl. Meta signs leases and provides a residual value guarantee, which keeps most of the project off its balance sheet. Meta also announced a new non-voting Class C stock as a possible way to raise equity, so new investors would get no vote on spending. [2] [3] [11] [12] [14] [15]

The spending pays for Muse Wonder, Meta's first frontier model. It is available through Meta's API at $4 per million input tokens and $20 per million output tokens, with a context window of about 1M tokens. The stronger Muse Wonder Full is available only inside the Muse Code subscription, at $50–200 a month. Neither model has downloadable weights. On the independent Artificial Analysis index, Wonder Full scores 56 and Wonder 52, compared with 53 for GPT-6 Astra and 58 for Claude Opus 5.5. [5] [6]

It is still unclear how Meta will make money from Muse. Zuckerberg says the product will be monetized sooner than Meta products usually are because of its compute costs. Reports of the user base disagree: one says more than 10 million users in the U.S. and Canada, another says 5 million. [8] [9]