Meta raises 2026 capex to $130-145B and launches Business Agents for WhatsApp and Instagram

Meta raised its 2026 capital expenditure guidance, lifting the lower bound to $130 billion (with some reports citing up to $145 billion), citing its aggressive AI-infrastructure buildout. Alongside the spending commitment, Meta unveiled Business Agents — AI agents that handle multi-turn conversations, inventory lookups, lead qualification and even checkout directly within WhatsApp and Instagram Direct, targeting the commerce and customer-service workflows of the millions of businesses on its platforms.

The mechanism is monetization of Meta's messaging surfaces: rather than businesses building bots externally, Business Agents run natively inside WhatsApp and Instagram, letting a customer discover a product, ask questions and complete a purchase without leaving the chat. This deepens Meta's push to turn its 3-billion-user messaging graph into a transactional commerce channel — a direct revenue lever distinct from advertising.

Strategically, Zuckerberg also signaled Meta is exploring selling excess AI compute capacity as cloud services, a notable pivot that would place Meta in partial competition with AWS and Azure. Combined with the metered Muse Spark 1.1 API, it marks Meta shifting from a pure open-weight, ad-funded model toward directly monetizing both models and infrastructure.

Competitively, Business Agents pit Meta against every conversational-commerce and customer-service AI vendor, leveraging its unmatched distribution. What to watch: whether the $130-145B capex pressures margins the way investors feared before AWS/Azure earnings soothed them, whether merchants adopt in-chat checkout at scale, and whether the rumored cloud-capacity resale becomes a real business line.