Meta Misses Q2 EPS, Stock Drops 8% as Capex Floor Rises to $135B
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- Meta reported Q2 EPS of $6.18 against analyst expectations of $7.14 (a 13% miss), while revenue beat at $60.8 billion versus $60.2 billion expected
- Meta stock fell nearly 8% immediately after the July 29 results, though it closed down just 1.31% at $585.61
- Meta raised the bottom of its 2026 capital expenditure range to $135-145 billion (up from $125-145 billion), with the bulk earmarked for data center build-out
- Meta and BlackRock announced a $14 billion, 1-gigawatt data center venture in El Paso, Texas, with BlackRock holding an 80% stake and Meta retaining 20%
- Zuckerberg told Bloomberg earlier in July that exploring an AI cloud business to lease out Meta's data center capacity to customers 'makes sense'
- Meta debuted its Musk Spark 1.1 AI model at $1.25 per million input tokens and $4.25 per million output tokens — undercutting Anthropic's Opus 4.8 pricing of $5 and $25 per million tokens respectively
- Meta could structure potential cloud deals after SpaceX's multibillion-dollar AI capacity arrangements with Anthropic and Google, or operate like neocloud CoreWeave
Why it matters: Meta raised the floor on 2026 capital expenditure to $135 billion while missing Q2 EPS by 13%, and the 8% post-earnings stock tumble shows investors penalizing the earnings shortfall even as Meta signaled aggressive AI infrastructure spending — including a $14 billion BlackRock data center deal and Spark 1.1 token pricing roughly 4-6x below Anthropic's Opus 4.8.
