Meta raises 2026 AI capex to $135-145B and creates non-voting Class C stock to fund it

The new share class lets Meta raise or pay with equity without diluting Mark Zuckerberg's voting control. It is a governance choice that investors will scrutinize, given that the money funds an open-ended compute race. The split is scheduled for January 2027.

The spending supports clusters such as Prometheus, which relies on object storage to feed massive training jobs. It also supports a model line that now spans the open-weight Muse Spark Open (816B total, 42B active parameters, released October 15) and the 30B Muse Glimmer, built for agentic tasks on consumer hardware.

Competitively, Meta is betting on scale plus distribution: Muse reached 10M North American users in about six weeks, and Meta is monetizing developers with Muse Wonder tiers. Rivals face the same capex escalation; Alibaba stock slid this week on concerns that AI spending is outrunning cash flow.

The skeptical take is that non-voting stock plus a rising capex range signals that cash flow alone may not keep pace. It also landed a day before a $25B privacy verdict against the company.