Meta accelerated its spending on capital expenditures in Q3 2026 as it seeks to speed the adoption of its compute-intensive Muse AI agent, the company said during its earnings call on October 21.
Capital expenditures totaled $34.9 billion in Q3, up from $31 billion in Q2 and $19.4 billion in the year-ago quarter, driven by investments in servers, network infrastructure and data centers, such as the Prometheus site in Ohio (see photo below). Meta said capex for the full year would come in at $135 billion to $145 billion, narrower than the previous estimate of $130 billion to $145 billion.
Meta said its Muse AI app had more than 10 million users, but its availability remains limited and the pace of expansion depends on the rate of its data center buildout and operational efficiencies.
“On the compute side, we are building out the capacity to serve more than a billion people over the next few years,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on the earnings call. “In the near term, Muse is very compute-intensive to run, but we expect to improve its cost efficiency by more than 10X in the next year, which will enable it to be profitable once the revenue lines are at scale.”
Meta’s Prometheus site in New Albany, OH, is a gigawatt-scale AI supercluster. Its completed first phase trained Muse’s foundational models, providing the intelligence behind Meta’s personal AI agent and autonomous tasks.
