Meta has made a bold move in the race to dominate artificial intelligence, committing over $10 billion to Google Cloud services over the next six years. The deal, one of the largest in Google Cloud’s history, will cover servers, storage, networking, and infrastructure designed to fuel Meta’s AI expansion.
Why Meta is spending big on AI
Mark Zuckerberg has been outspoken about his vision for advanced artificial intelligence, often describing it as “personal superintelligence” that can be made accessible to everyone. To realize this ambition, Meta has been aggressively recruiting talent from major players such as Apple and OpenAI, while simultaneously investing heavily in the hardware and platforms needed to power massive AI models.
The company’s spending reflects how central AI has become to its identity and long-term strategy. Investments in models like Llama and the integration of AI-driven tools across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp are just the beginning. Meta expects its AI efforts to reshape user experiences, advertising, and digital interactions on a global scale.
Rising costs and ambitious forecasts
Meta’s financial reports reveal just how expensive this journey will be. In the second quarter alone, capital expenditures jumped to $17 billion, with the majority allocated to AI. For 2025, the company has forecast total capital spending between $66 billion and $72 billion, while overall expenses are expected to top $114 billion. Executives have cautioned that the price tag will rise even further in 2026 as AI development accelerates.
Analysts note that even strong quarterly earnings won’t fully shield Meta from investor concerns. The pressure to deliver real-world returns from these investments will intensify as costs climb and competition in AI continues to heat up.
What’s in it for Google
The agreement is a significant win for Google Cloud, which has been working to close the gap with leaders like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. Securing large enterprise deals is critical for Google’s growth strategy, and earlier this year it also landed OpenAI as a cloud client—further underscoring its momentum.
Google’s parent company, Alphabet, recently reported $13.6 billion in quarterly cloud revenue, a 32% year-over-year increase. The Meta partnership strengthens Google’s positioning in one of the fastest-growing and most lucrative areas of enterprise technology.
Rivals and partners at the same time
The irony is not lost on observers: Meta and Google are fierce competitors in online advertising, yet they are now tied together in a partnership built around AI infrastructure. This is not Meta’s first such collaboration either—it already uses services from Amazon and Microsoft. The demands of training ever-larger AI models and deploying them at scale have pushed even the biggest tech companies to rely on external providers.
Zuckerberg has framed the 2020s as a transformative decade for artificial intelligence, one in which Meta intends to play a leading role. But building toward that future comes with massive costs—and with it, growing dependence on the very companies it once saw as adversaries.