Meta holds 2026 capital spending at up to $145 billion as data center partners await 2027 plan

Meta executives on Wednesday said they are holding off on refining their capital spending plans for 2027—keeping the data center buildout market guessing about whether the massive expansion across the U.S. will continue at a torrid pace or begin to tap the brakes.

In its third-quarter earnings announcement, Meta Platforms said it spent $34.9 billion on capital expenditures and expects full-year spending of $135 billion to $145 billion, including principal payments on finance leases. 

The company raised the low end of its prior $130 billion-to-$145 billion forecast by $5 billion. Third-quarter spending went mainly to servers, data centers and network infrastructure.

Meta gave no 2027 figure. It told investors Wednesday that it expects to keep investing aggressively in its core business and emerging AI initiatives and is still developing next year’s budget and capacity plans. 

That leaves cloud providers, data center developers, and infrastructure investors with signed contracts to execute, with potential expansions still to be decided.

“We are quite early in developing our budget and capacity plans for next year,” Chief Financial Officer Susan Li said when asked about 2027 spending. Meta is evaluating proposals with “attractive return profiles over different time horizons,” she said. Li said Meta typically gives guidance for the next year on its fourth-quarter earnings call.

Li said Meta’s current and scheduled capacity gives it room to direct computing resources to model training, growth in its existing apps and new products. Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg tied the expansion to Muse, the company’s AI agent, and Muse Wonder, its first frontier model. Meta is building capacity to serve more than 1 billion people over the next few years, he said, while working to make the service less expensive to run.

Zuckerberg said Muse’s compute cost remains high enough to constrain a wider rollout. He expects more than a tenfold improvement in cost efficiency over the next year, a target that depends on work still under way.

Much of Meta’s spending with suppliers is already under contract. In its second-quarter filing, Meta reported $349.31 billion in noncancelable commitments as of June 30, mostly for third-party cloud capacity, servers, network infrastructure, data centers and Reality Labs hardware. About $81.65 billion was due in 2027. Part of that total covers servers and data centers, which count as capital spending when paid.

The same filing listed $278.99 billion in leases for data centers, colocation and network infrastructure that had not yet begun. Meta also signed about $68 billion in additional data center leases in July, scheduled to start in 2027 and 2028. Those figures span many years. Meta’s capital spending measure covers property and equipment purchases and finance lease principal; operating leases and cloud contracts are reported separately.

CoreWeave has the largest disclosed cloud contracts with Meta. A 2025 order committed Meta to pay up to about $14.2 billion through December 2031, subject to service delivery and availability. In April, the companies announced a separate expansion worth about $21 billion through December 2032. The two orders total about $35.2 billion. CoreWeave said the capacity will be spread across multiple sites and include early deployments of Nvidia’s Vera Rubin platform for AI inference.

CoreWeave collects on those agreements as it delivers usable capacity. Additional Meta demand could come as new orders under the companies’ 2023 master services agreement. The orders are terminable for cause and sit outside Meta’s own construction budget.

Nebius has a different mix of fixed and variable demand. Its March agreement, its second with Meta after a November 2025 deal for two dedicated GPU clusters, calls for $12 billion of dedicated Vera Rubin capacity over five years, with delivery beginning in early 2027. Meta also agreed to buy up to $15 billion of capacity on certain forthcoming clusters that Nebius does not sell to other customers. Nebius described the combined value as up to about $27 billion.

The second tranche works as a backstop: Meta buys the capacity Nebius does not sell to others, so strong third-party sales reduce Meta’s share. Meta’s second-quarter filing separately reported up to $14.72 billion in contingent cloud purchases that would decline if the provider sold capacity elsewhere; the filing did not identify the provider.

Meta is also using partners to finance campuses it will occupy. At Hyperion in Louisiana’s Richland Parish, Blue Owl Capital funds own 80 percent of a venture with about $27 billion in estimated development costs. Meta owns 20 percent, manages construction and has signed leases on the campus that begin in 2029, with an initial commitment of about $12.31 billion. Blue Owl contributed about $7 billion in cash when the venture was formed, while Meta received a distribution of about $3 billion. In July, Meta said it would expand Hyperion to 5 gigawatts and more than $50 billion in total investment.

The financing structure gives Blue Owl exposure to the buildout and Meta access to a large campus without funding every construction dollar directly. Meta’s initial Hyperion leases run four years, with renewal options. Its filing also describes residual value guarantees with an approximately $28 billion threshold that falls over time. A guarantee payment would depend on lease termination or nonrenewal and the property’s value under the agreement’s conditions. Meta reported its maximum exposure to loss on the venture at $46.03 billion as of June 30.

Meta repeated the approach in El Paso, Texas. BlackRock-managed funds own 80 percent of a venture building a 1-gigawatt campus with about $14 billion in development costs. Meta owns the rest, will lease the entire campus and expects the first capacity in 2028. BlackRock contributed about $4.9 billion in cash; part of its investment was funded by a $12.5 billion debt financing. Meta contributed land and construction assets valued at about $2.3 billion and received a distribution of about $1 billion. Meta provided residual value guarantees with a threshold of about $13 billion that declines over time.

CleanSpark must build its Meta facility before rent begins. Its Sandersville, Georgia, lease covers 175 megawatts of critical IT load for 20 years and carries about $6.6 billion in base-term rent. A later investor presentation identified the tenant as Anviran LLC, a wholly owned Meta subsidiary, and Meta as guarantor. Rent is targeted to begin in the fourth quarter of 2027, provided CleanSpark meets financing, construction and delivery milestones.

The Sandersville tenant also has a letter of intent and exclusivity arrangement covering 718 acres of CleanSpark’s Texas portfolio, with up to 885 megawatts of secured and planned power. CleanSpark’s filings say missed milestones at Sandersville could trigger rent abatements or termination.

Outside the United States, Reliance Industries plans to build a 168-megawatt data center in Jamnagar, India, that Meta will lease with options to scale. The agreement adds another route for growth.

Power suppliers are part of the U.S. buildout as well. Meta has agreements with Vistra, TerraPower and Oklo, alongside a 20-year deal with Constellation Energy that starts in 2027 and supports the Clinton nuclear plant in Illinois. The Vistra agreements support existing plants in Ohio and Pennsylvania and planned uprates. TerraPower’s agreement supports two initial Natrium units that could deliver power as early as 2032 and gives Meta rights to energy from up to six additional units; Oklo’s proposed Ohio project could come online as early as 2030. Entergy plans seven additional natural gas plants for Hyperion, bringing the number planned for the site to 10, along with battery storage at three locations and nuclear uprates.

Meta’s third-quarter free cash flow was negative $2.1 billion. The company reported $82.5 billion in cash and marketable securities at the end of September, and Li put total debt at $83.7 billion. Meta said its board approved the new nonvoting Class C stock and shareholders approved the charter amendment, scheduled to take effect Jan. 19, 2027. Li said the share class would expand the company’s funding tools. For its counterparties, the near-term work is delivering signed capacity. Meta’s next capital spending figure will clarify how much additional construction and computing demand it intends to place beyond those commitments.