Meta says AI infrastructure costs are rising faster than core business revenue; shares fall after hours
The cost of building AI infrastructure is now rising faster than the core business. Chief Financial Officer Susan Li said legal and severance charges distorted Meta’s second-quarter results. But recurring costs are also climbing. Li noted that spending on AI talent, data center operations, third-party cloud services, and AI compute consumption (tokens) is all increasing. Even excluding those one-time charges, Meta’s spending growth is still outpacing its core business, which saw sales jump 28% year over year. As a result, Meta shares fell more than 8% in after-hours trading.