00:00Meta tried to give Wall Street a clearer answer to the $145 billion question.
00:05How does all this AI spending eventually make money?
00:08Mark Zuckerberg laid out a new enterprise strategy built around APIs,
00:13business agents, productivity tools, and potentially selling compute.
00:17There is an ongoing shift from social media to AI.
00:21Zuckerberg doesn't want Meta to become just another cloud provider.
00:25He basically said, sure, Meta could rent out GPUs today,
00:29but the bigger prize is building AI products and services on top of that infrastructure.
00:34In terms of the quarter gone itself, it was mixed.
00:37Revenue rose 28% and beat expectations, but the third quarter sales forecast was lackluster.
00:43Expenses jumped 55%, free cash flow fell to $784 million,
00:48its lowest level since 2022 as Meta poured cash into AI infrastructure.
00:53The bottom line was also hit by about $3.6 billion in legal and severance charges.
00:59Excluding those, Meta says, operating income would have grown 9%.
01:03Meta kept its 2026 CapEx ceiling at $145 billion,
01:09but raised the lower end of the range to $130 billion,
01:13and it gave no 2027 CapEx outlook.
01:17So Meta has ways to monetize AI.
01:19The question is whether those new businesses can scale fast enough to justify the spending.
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