Meta Doubles Down: $115-$135 B 2026 Capex Green-lit for ‘Personal Superintelligence’

Silicon titans have triggered spending waves before: AT&T’s 1983 push to digitise its network or Intel’s 1994 ‘fab binge’ each re-priced entire supply chains but paid off only years later. Meta’s bet reflects a decades-long trend of platform owners racing to own foundational tech layers—from IBM’s System/360 (1964) to Apple designing its own M-series chips (2020). By shouldering perhaps the largest single-year capex in corporate history outside national oil firms, Meta is wagering that proprietary ‘personal superintelligence’ becomes the next consumer OS, and that controlling it secures ad and device dominance for a generation. If the gamble fails—because of regulatory clamps on targeting, an AI demand bust, or a public pivot away from social platforms—the spend could echo the fibre-optic glut of 2001. But if it succeeds, historians in 2126 may mark 2026 as the year social media companies morphed into AI infrastructure utilities, rewriting organisational scale and human-computer interaction norms.