Facebook: Costs projected to rise as meta capex for data centers, servers, and networks reaches $6.4 billion

In the last quarter, Meta's capital expenditures reached $6.4 billion due to investments in data centers, servers, and network infrastructure. This is a decrease from the $7.1 billion the company spent in the previous quarter, but the Facebook proprietor is now done with a data center restructuring initiative that resulted in the cancellation or suspension of several ongoing development projects.

Meta stated in February that it would spend $4 billion less on capital expenditures due to setbacks and a cheaper data center plan.  CFO Susan Li added this week during an earnings call that the company has saved revenue on "non-AI servers where we previously had some underutilized capacity, and we've been identifying ways to allocate that capacity more efficiently to all of our various needs."

Postponements in data center projects and server deliveries continue to account for a significant portion of the savings, which will shift the associated capex, which we had planned for 2023, into 2024. Late in 2022, Meta's announced its intention to abandon existing data center initiatives in favor of an unfinished new design. Meta announced in May that the next-generation facilities would be superior at supporting large GPU clusters for AI training and inference under the new concept. Li stated that if the company does not end up requiring as much computation for generative AI workloads, the servers will be repurposed for core AI work supporting advertising and engagement.