Meta earned $64.6 billion in the third quarter of 2026, a 26% increase from the same time last year. However, the company spent 68% more than it did a year ago, mostly on AI technology.
The company now has 3.64 billion daily users across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. India now leads as Meta’s biggest market by user count. Ad prices also rose 14% in the quarter, which helped Meta earn more.
Yet Meta’s spending tells a different story. In the previous quarter, Meta’s profit fell 14% to $15.85 billion, even though it made 28% more money than the year before. The company plans to spend between $130 billion and $145 billion this year on building AI data centers and buying powerful chips. Furthermore, Meta expects its total costs for 2026 to reach between $165 billion and $169 billion.
Meanwhile, Meta cut 15% of its workforce over the past year, bringing its total staff down to 66,775. The company fired around 8,000 workers in May 2026, even as it poured billions into AI hardware. As a result, Meta keeps replacing workers with AI technology at a fast pace.
Unlike Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, Meta does not sell AI tools to other businesses. All of its AI spending goes toward improving its own apps like Facebook ads and its Muse chatbot. In contrast, competitors earn direct money from AI by selling it to companies. However, a Morgan Stanley report found that most Muse users stop using it just two weeks after download.
Nevertheless, Meta added 40 million new daily users in the third quarter. Ad views grew 10%, though that pace slowed from recent quarters. The company also said that Threads now has more monthly users than X (formerly Twitter). The Asia Pacific region saw the fastest ad view growth at 24% this year.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg calls AI the company’s biggest priority. Still, the gap between what Meta spends on AI and what it gets back keeps growing. The company needs to prove that its massive spending leads to real results, not just bigger bills.
