Meta's profit fell 14 percent last quarter while Mark Zuckerberg shoveled billions into AI data centers and legal settlements — and the man who built an empire harvesting your data now wants to build the machines that will censor you more efficiently.
The numbers tell the story. Meta pulled in $60.8 billion in revenue, up 28 percent year over year, but costs exploded 55 percent to $42 billion, crushing profit to $15.85 billion. The stock dropped more than 6 percent in after-hours trading. Wall Street is spooked, and ordinary Americans should be too: the same company that silences dissent at scale is now building the most powerful censorship apparatus ever conceived.
Zuckerberg raised Meta's capital expenditure forecast to at least $130 billion for 2026 — up from $72.2 billion in 2025 — with the bulk funding AI infrastructure. Variety reported that Meta also took a $2.4 billion charge for legal proceedings and $1.18 billion in severance costs from laying off 8,000 employees in May to fund the AI pivot. The legal charges are mounting: CFO Susan Li warned of "youth-related trials scheduled for this year in the U.S., which may ultimately result in a material loss."
Then there's Reality Labs, the virtual reality division that has burned over $80 billion in operating losses since late 2020. It lost another $4.62 billion last quarter on just $431 million in revenue. The VR market consumers never wanted keeps draining cash while Zuckerberg chases the next shiny object.
Zuckerberg's rhetoric is pure Silicon Valley sleight of hand. "A.I. is accelerating our core business today, powering our next generation of products, and opening the door to entirely new enterprise opportunities," he said in a statement. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, he claimed to believe in "delivering personal superintelligence to everyone" and criticized "centralizing" AI power among a "handful of institutions." This from the man who runs one of those institutions and has centralized control over what 3.6 billion daily users can see and say.
The New York Times noted that unlike Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, Meta lacks a cloud computing business — so it's spending unprecedented sums to enter a market where it has no track record. Anthropic has reportedly discussed buying computing power from Meta in a deal worth up to $10 billion. Variety reported a separate $10 billion venture with BlackRock to build a data center campus in El Paso, Texas. Follow the money: BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager, now has a seat at the AI table alongside the company that knows more about you than you know about yourself.
Big tech companies are expected to spend $1.5 trillion on data centers this year and next. That kind of money doesn't just build better algorithms — it builds power.
The same company that suspended its Muse Image feature after public backlash over its opt-out privacy policy wants you to trust it with superintelligence. The same platform that censored accurate reporting on Hunter Biden's laptop and suppressed dissenting voices on COVID wants you to believe it will deliver "individual empowerment."
Zuckerberg is making the biggest bet in corporate history on AI, and he's doing it with the data he harvested from you. The question isn't whether the technology works — it's who controls it, and what they'll use it to silence next.