The payback math, from the filings, starts with whether the spend is decelerating. It is not. Meta's Q1 2026 Form 10-Q, filed 2026-04-30, reports $19.0 billion in capital expenditures for the quarter ended March 31, 2026, against $12.9 billion in the year-ago quarter. EdgarBeast surfaced the XBRL facts.
Put it next to the annual picture and the trend is coherent: full-year 2025 capex was $69.7 billion, nearly double 2024, and the first quarter of 2026 came in roughly 47% above the first quarter of 2025. The buildout that defined last year did not pause at the calendar turn.
Meta's most recent 10-Q ties its product strategy to an "AI-powered discovery engine to recommend relevant content," which it says has already improved user engagement and monetization. The capex line is the cost side of that engine; the engagement claim is the asserted return. Both are in the filings, and only one is a hard number.
As always, the disclosed figure is total property-and-equipment spend, not an AI-only carve-out — read it as the scale of the commitment, not as a segmented AI bill. The 10-Q on sec.gov is primary; EdgarBeast is the evidence index.