Meta can't afford its $600B love letter to Trump
www.theregister.com

... Meta on Friday floated plans to invest $600 billion in US infrastructure and jobs by 2028 as part of a massive datacenter expansion.

The lofty goal eclipses OpenAI's $500 billion Stargate initiative. But like its rival, Meta can't actually afford the infrastructure project CEO Mark Zuckerberg has promised President Donald Trump.

For Meta to realize the $600 billion goal by the end of 2028, it would need to increase its capital expenditures nearly threefold from the $70-72 billion it expects to spend in 2025.

Zuckercorp has already warned of "notably larger" spending in 2026, but the company earned "only" $62 billion in profit last year, up from $39 billion in 2023. So even if it used all of its near-liquid assets -- as of Q3, Meta had about $44.5 billion in cash, cash equivalents, and other marketable securities -- and plowed every dollar of profit into bit barns for the next few years, Meta would be hard pressed to pull this off.

That is, unless Meta takes on massive debt. ...