Meta reports Q1 earnings today, and the market’s attention is on a bigger question than the quarter itself: can the company keep funding a spending plan that has swelled far faster than its 2025 outlay? Meta guided 2026 capital expenditures to between $115 billion and $135 billion, roughly 73% above what it spent in all of 2025, Reuters reported in January.

That plan looks even larger beside the prior year’s spending. Capital expenditures, including principal payments on finance leases, were $72.22 billion in 2025, Meta’s filing showed. At the midpoint, this year’s capex would be almost twice that amount.

The real question in today’s report is whether Meta’s ad business can still carry the load while spending ramps up. Investors are not just looking for a good quarter. They want proof that the cash machine still hums when the bill gets this big.

Meta’s capex surge is part of a broader spending wave across big tech. Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft are together forecast to spend about $650 billion on capital expenditures in 2026, Bloomberg reported in February, calling it “a boom without a parallel this century.”

Meta says its own version of that boom is tied to “superintelligence,” a push to deliver deeply personalized AI to its social media users, Reuters reported. That is the company’s framing of the spending, and it matters because it treats data centers and chips less like overhead and more like product development at industrial scale.

The quarterly trend was already moving in that direction before today’s report. Meta said capex was $22.14 billion in Q4 2025, Meta’s filing showed, while Reuters reported that capex rose 49% in the quarter as revenue increased 24%, which cut operating margin by 7 percentage points. Today’s earnings are the first clean read on whether that pace carried into 2026.

For now, the bill is still being paid by advertising. Meta posted $201 billion in revenue last year, up 22%, with just over $196 billion coming from ads, AdExchanger reported in January.

The ad business also ended 2025 with some momentum. In Q4, ad impressions across Meta’s services rose 18% year over year, while the average price per ad increased 6%, AdExchanger reported. Meta’s family daily active people averaged 3.58 billion in December, Yahoo Finance reported in January, which gives the company a user base few rivals can match.

The overlap between AI spending and ad performance is also part of the story. Meta’s AI infrastructure helps train the models it uses to decide which ads to show, how often to show them, and how to optimize for clicks and conversions, AdExchanger reported. In the second half of 2025, Meta’s ad redistribution efforts on Facebook produced a revenue impact nearly four times larger than raising ad load, according to AdExchanger.

Meta’s Q1 revenue outlook of $53.5 billion to $56.5 billion also came in above analyst expectations of $51.41 billion, Reuters reported. That is the backdrop for today’s earnings: a bigger capex plan, but still a business that has, so far, kept growing fast enough to fund it.

The capex debate is only part of Meta’s cost problem. Reality Labs, the division behind its metaverse and mixed-reality hardware push, remains a separate drag on the company’s finances. Meta said Reality Labs accounted for 18% of total costs and expenses in 2025, and its investments totaled $21.40 billion, Meta’s filing showed.

Meta is not trying to hide the long game. The company said it expects Reality Labs to “continue to operate at a loss for the foreseeable future,” Meta’s filing said, while also describing the division as a bet on the next computing platform and future monetization through advertising, hardware and digital goods. That is management’s case, not a guarantee.

The pressure point for investors is that this spending is happening alongside higher costs elsewhere. Meta’s operating margin fell to 41% from 48% a year earlier in Q4, while costs and expenses rose 40%, Yahoo Finance reported. The company also ended 2025 with $58.74 billion in long-term debt, and it issued roughly $29.9 billion of long-term debt net in Q4, Yahoo Finance reported. That is a lot of borrowing for a company that is still throwing off enormous cash, and it tells you something about how fast the spending plan is moving.

Meta also forecast total 2026 expenses of $162 billion to $169 billion, up from $117.69 billion in 2025, with AI talent compensation cited as a major driver, Reuters reported. Put simply, investors are being asked to accept two expensive bets at once.

The market has already shown it is willing to tolerate some of that strain. After Meta’s January results, shares initially jumped about 10% in after-hours trading, Yahoo Finance reported, as investors digested stronger-than-expected results and a bullish revenue outlook.

That reaction may not hold if the next few quarters show costs rising faster than the business can absorb them. Today’s report will matter less for the headline number than for the details underneath it: revenue, margins, and whether Meta says anything new about full-year spending.

The capex range Meta laid out in January already overshot analyst expectations before a single Q1 number was on the table. If today’s earnings show that ad growth is still keeping pace, investors may keep giving the company room. If not, the story starts to look less like disciplined infrastructure spending and more like a very expensive race to build the future before anyone has proved exactly how it gets paid for.