Analyst: Meta's massive AI infrastructure spending is a strategic move to sell compute

Meta Platforms (META) has issued a 2026 capital expenditure guidance of $130 billion to $145 billion, with $349 billion in contractual obligations. Analysts suggest this aggressive spending is not merely for internal use but to hoard scarce compute capacity to sell as a cloud service, positioning Meta to compete with AWS, Azure, and GCP. While the core advertising business remains solid, the company's AI strategy is viewed as a long-term play to commoditize AI models and control the underlying infrastructure. Risks include the unprecedented scale of CapEx and potential demand fluctuations.