Meta Platforms just reminded Wall Street that building the future of AI doesn’t come cheap. The company posted Q2 2026 earnings per share of $6.18, badly missing the $7.14 consensus estimate, and then raised its full-year capital expenditure guidance for good measure. Shares dropped nearly 8% in after-hours trading.
The revenue picture was fine, technically. Meta brought in $60.8 billion for the quarter, edging past the $60.2 billion analysts had penciled in. Advertising revenue hit $59.3 billion, topping the $59.07 billion expectation.
The AI spending spree intensifies
Meta bumped its full-year 2026 capex guidance to $135-145 billion, up from the $125-145 billion range it had set earlier this year. That’s not a subtle adjustment. The low end of the range jumped $10 billion in a single quarter.
In Q1 2026, the company had already reported capex of $19.84 billion. Now it’s signaling even more aggressive spending through the rest of the year, almost entirely directed toward data centers and AI infrastructure.
The day before earnings dropped, Meta announced a partnership with BlackRock to build a $14 billion data center in Texas. The facility is expected to deliver 1 gigawatt of capacity.
Why the EPS miss stings
The $6.18 EPS versus the $7.14 estimate represents roughly a 13% miss, the kind of shortfall that makes institutional investors reassess their models quickly.
The nearly 8% after-hours decline wiped a substantial chunk off Meta’s market capitalization. For a company of Meta’s size, that translates to tens of billions of dollars in shareholder value evaporating in a single evening session.
What this means for crypto and broader markets
Meta’s earnings report contained zero references to cryptocurrency or blockchain-related initiatives. The company that once tried to launch its own stablecoin, Libra (later renamed Diem), has clearly moved on.
That $14 billion Texas data center needs 1 gigawatt of power, and it’s just one facility among many being planned industry-wide. This escalating energy demand creates an interesting dynamic for Bitcoin miners. Many mining operations sit on energy contracts and infrastructure that could become increasingly valuable as AI companies compete for power capacity. Some miners have already started pivoting toward providing compute services to AI firms, effectively monetizing their energy access in both directions.