Meta Posts $22.8B Q4 Profit, Signals $115-135B AI CapEx for 2026

Silicon Valley has seen this movie before: in 1993-95, Amazon and others ploughed cash into bare-metal datacentres that looked ruinous until cloud margins appeared a decade later. Meta’s proposed $115-135 billion AI build-out echoes IBM’s 1964 System/360 gamble—an all-in bet on a still-forming computing paradigm—and the early-2000s telecom fiber glut that left investors nursing write-offs before demand caught up. The announcement embodies two long arcs: (1) the secular shift from user-generated content toward machine-generated experiences, and (2) the concentration of compute power—and therefore corporate power—in a handful of trillion-dollar firms. Whether this moment marks the birth of a new platform or another CapEx bubble will matter less next quarter than over the next century, where the precedent being set is that global consumer attention can justify nation-state-scale infrastructure spending by private entities—a dynamic with profound economic and regulatory ramifications.