Meta plans to spend as much as $145 billion on capital expenditures in 2026, a roughly 101% increase from the $72.2 billion it spent the previous year. The scale of the planned investment would put Meta’s annual capital spending above the military budgets of every country except the United States, China and Russia.

The company has said the spending will support its core business, with higher component prices and additional data-center costs contributing to the increase. Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg said artificial intelligence will account for a “significant portion” of the total. Reuters has also reported that the increase is tied to Meta’s computing infrastructure and cloud agreements.

“As AI usage in our products and businesses continues to ramp, we continue to invest aggressively in infrastructure to meet the demand,” Zuckerberg said during Meta’s Q2 2026 earnings call. “We expect that a significant portion of our compute is going to go towards training our models, growing our core business and delivering personal agents and new products, but we also expect to grow a large business serving large customers as well.”

Zuckerberg has described 2026 as a pivotal year for Meta’s effort to build what he calls a “superintelligence.”

“The opportunity in front of us is massive,” he said. “We are now at a point where our investments in AI are accelerating every major part of our core business. They’re improving the experience for people using our apps, driving better performance for advertisers, and helping our teams build new experiences and ship faster.”

“We’re developing new personal agents that will be the foundation for our next wave of products and revenue lines in the months and years ahead,” he continued. “We see a large enterprise opportunity to sell to businesses, including APIs, business agents, potentially selling compute directly, and other services that we’re building for large customers.”

According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the United States spent $954 billion on its military in 2025. China followed with an estimated $336 billion, while Russia spent an estimated $190 billion. Germany ranked fourth at $113 billion, followed by India at $92 billion. Set against those figures, Meta’s planned 2026 outlay would slot in between Russia’s and Germany’s, placing a single company alongside the world’s largest state military budgets.

Meta’s capital expenditures have accelerated as the company has shifted its focus toward AI. In addition to the $145 billion capital-spending forecast, Meta projects that total expenses in 2026 could reach $169 billion. Reuters has reported that the increase reflects higher compensation, the recruitment of AI talent and infrastructure spending.

Meta reported $28.1 billion in capital expenditures in 2023, $39.23 billion in 2024 and $72.22 billion in 2025, according to its SEC filings. The 2025 figure exceeded the company’s earlier forecast, which had projected capital expenditures of up to $65 billion. Meta also spent $27.05 billion on property and equipment in 2023, $37.26 billion in 2024 and $69.69 billion in 2025. At the top end of the new guidance, 2026 capital spending would run more than five times the 2023 level — and with 2025 spending having come in above the company’s earlier forecast, any revisions to that 2026 figure will be worth tracking.

“AI is accelerating our core business today, powering our next generation of products, and opening the door to entirely new enterprise opportunities,” Zuckerberg said in a company press release. “The results are already showing, and I’m optimistic about the potential ahead.”

Much of the planned infrastructure is intended to support Meta’s AI systems. The company has been building large data centers and securing computing capacity from outside providers.

Spending is also increasing across the largest technology companies. According to Reuters, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft are on track to spend about $730 billion on AI in 2026, up from previous estimates of $600 billion. Meta’s planned $145 billion would account for roughly a fifth of that combined total, a measure of how much of the industry-wide ramp is concentrated in a single company’s budget. Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Fortune.

Source: Fortune