Meta Platforms (META) Q2 FY26 earnings call: guidance and Q&A

Which new AI opportunities (consumer/business agents, API, compute rental) are expected to scale first in '26/'27 to show quantifiable ROIC for investors?

Mark Zuckerberg expressed optimism for meaningful growth across all new AI areas, including optimizing the core business, new consumer products, API, business agents, developer tools, and direct compute sales. He noted that selling intelligence offers higher margins than selling compute directly, but both present significant opportunities.

“I'm actually quite optimistic that we're going to see meaningful growth in all of these areas. And I think we will have more to share soon on a number of them.”

asked by Brian Nowak · answered by Mark Zuckerberg

Can you provide any early comments on 2027 CapEx or the philosophy around financing this multi-year build?

Susan Li stated that Meta is not providing a specific 2027 CapEx outlook due to the highly dynamic nature of infrastructure planning. She emphasized maximizing capacity for 2026 and 2027, while building flexibility for 2028 and beyond, noting that near-term capacity is considered more valuable.

“We aren't providing a specific outlook for 2027 CapEx at this time. Infrastructure planning remains highly dynamic.”

asked by Brian Nowak · answered by Susan Li

How much of the enterprise opportunity can be addressed with existing go-to-market strategies (extensions of advertising/marketing) versus requiring new strategies?

Mark Zuckerberg views business agents for customer-facing interactions as a natural extension of Meta's existing ad business. However, developing coding and productivity tools for other enterprise needs will require building a 'somewhat different muscle' for go-to-market, which he sees as a large and important opportunity.

“We view this as an extension of the sales and the partnerships that we have with many millions of advertisers and hundreds of millions of small businesses that use our platforms.”

asked by Eric Sheridan · answered by Mark Zuckerberg

How is Meta thinking about the mix of debt and equity and other capital sources to fund its ambitious spend?

Susan Li highlighted Meta's strong operating cash flow and its recent evolution to include more debt in its capital structure to lower the cost of capital. She also mentioned broadening the approach to include partnerships, such as the one with BlackRock, to prudently add long-duration capital for long-horizon investments like AI infrastructure.

“We've also been evolving our capital structure in recent years to include a greater mix of debt as we work to bring down our cost of capital.”

asked by Eric Sheridan · answered by Susan Li

How does Meta think about consumer adoption closing the AI utility gap, especially for personal agents, given the current state of AI tools?

Mark Zuckerberg believes personal agents will become a massive and almost inevitable market within 5 years, with billions of people using them 24/7 for various life goals. He emphasized that for consumer products, especially those targeting billions, they need to 'just work' out of the box, a strength he believes Meta possesses in scaling experiences.

“I think that it's extremely unlikely if you look out 5 years from now, for example, that whatever period of time you want that you don't have billions of people with a personal agent that understands your goals and it is just working on your behalf 24/7 to achieve your goals.”

asked by Mark Shmulik · answered by Mark Zuckerberg

Can you elaborate on the roadmap for LLM-driven ranking and recommendation gains, and how far along Meta is in leveraging these models?

Susan Li stated that Meta sees further headroom for improving recommendations into 2027, focusing on greater personalization, advancing models, and enhancing data infrastructure. This includes expanding LLM-based content understanding and using AI to surface high-quality, fresh content. She also noted significant strides in using LLM-based agentic approaches to transform the recommendation system.

“First of all, we certainly see further headroom to continue improving recommendations over the rest of the year and into 2027.”

asked by Doug Anmuth · answered by Susan Li

What are your thoughts on the AI lab's performance, the expected uptick in product velocity, and the sustainable competitive advantages being built?

Mark Zuckerberg expressed satisfaction with the AI lab's trajectory, citing impressive model releases and scaling. He highlighted the 'data flywheel' and Meta's proven ability to scale products to billions as key advantages. He believes the personal and business agent work, combined with these data flywheels, will create durable competitive advantages.

“I think that we've definitely shown at Meta that when we have a product and a format that works, we -- I would go as far as to say that I think we're probably the best company in the world at scaling those experiences to billions of people.”

asked by Justin Post · answered by Mark Zuckerberg

Can you discuss Meta's strategy for competing at both the lower-cost and high-performance ends of AI models, and how open source fits into the monetization strategy?

Mark Zuckerberg explained the need for both advanced models to solve hard problems and efficient models for scaling to billions of users. He reaffirmed Meta's commitment to open source as important for the ecosystem and community, planning to continue a mix of open and closed models, and expects to release more open source models soon.

“I think that they are very impressive models for the scale of the model, the kind of stage of development of the lab, and I feel quite good about them.”

asked by Ross Sandler · answered by Mark Zuckerberg