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Meta Platforms (META) is pouring billions of dollars into the computing power that runs artificial intelligence (AI). Now the social media giant is looking abroad to keep the buildout going.
Meta is in the middle of one of the largest infrastructure pushes in corporate history. On the company’s first-quarter 2026 earnings call, Chief Financial Officer Susan Li said the company now expects to spend between $125 billion and $145 billion on capital expenditures this year. That’s up from an earlier range of $115 billion to $135 billion. Li pointed to higher component prices, especially memory, as one reason for the jump in capex.
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The bigger story is what all that money buys: inference capacity. In plain terms, that’s the computing muscle Meta needs to run AI agents for billions of people simultaneously. CEO Mark Zuckerberg told investors that new cloud and infrastructure deals added a $107 billion step-up in the company’s future commitments in a single quarter.
Translation? Meta needs a lot more data centers. And it can’t build them all itself.
Inside the Meta-Reliance Data Center Deal in India
Last week, Meta announced that it will lease an AI data center from Reliance Industries in India. The site will offer 168 megawatts of capacity. A sprawling conglomerate with a presence in oil, textiles, retail, telecom, and media, Reliance will build the facility in Jamnagar and hand it over within two years, with room to scale later.
Zuckerberg called the data center a “world-class facility” that will help Meta grow its AI work globally while investing in India’s economy. Notably, Meta invested $5.7 billion in Reliance’s Jio Platforms in 2020, and last year the two teamed up to bring Meta’s open-source AI models to Indian businesses.
For Meta, leasing makes sense, as building a data center from scratch is a long process. Renting a facility that is already planned will get the company online faster.
Why Global Tech Giants Are Turning to India
India has quickly become one of the hottest markets for AI infrastructure. According to the CNBCroughly $400 billion has flowed into the country’s AI ecosystem over the past year, with most of it going toward data centers and related power solutions.
