To stay competitive in the artificial intelligence race, Meta increased its spending on data centers last year and began shifting away from virtual reality. Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, set its capital expenditure forecast for 2026 at $115 billion to $135 billion, nearly twice the $72 billion the company spent last year. Meta’s core business of online advertising continued to grow, providing cash for its AI spending. Story continues below this adMeta’s AI spending spree continued last month when it bought Manus, an AI startup based in Singapore, for $2 billion. The bulk of Meta’s new AI spending will be on infrastructure like data centers, under an initiative it announced this month called Meta Compute.