Meta is set to invest between $100 billion and $200 billion in artificial intelligence, according to CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The announcement came during a podcast appearance with Alexandr Wang, the 29-year-old MIT dropout and Scale AI cofounder who now leads Meta Superintelligence Labs. This massive funding commitment supports the development of Muse, Meta's personal AI agent, which launched in the U.S. on September 8 and quickly topped 2.5 million downloads on Apple’s App Store within two weeks, per Sensor Tower data cited by CNN.
The decision to back Muse and its frontier-class model, Muse Wonder, follows Zuckerberg’s growing confidence in Wang’s leadership after a 44-minute call and a detailed memo. Wang, who joined Meta last year, has been instrumental in steering the company’s AI efforts. Meta’s capital expenditures for 2026 are projected to reach $130 billion to $145 billion, nearly double the $72.2 billion spent in 2025, reflecting the company’s aggressive push into AI technologies, as reported by fortune.com.
This investment dwarfs previous commitments in the tech sector and signals Meta’s strategic pivot from its earlier metaverse focus, which saw tens of billions spent with limited user adoption. Muse’s rapid adoption and the scale of funding underscore the importance Meta places on AI as a core growth area. The move places Meta alongside other tech giants making substantial AI bets, highlighting the intensifying competition in the AI assistant and personal agent market.
Meta’s Muse app, launched just over a month ago, has already become the most popular free app on Apple’s App Store in the U.S., with over 2.5 million downloads. The company’s 2026 capital expenditure plans, which include this AI investment, represent one of the largest single-year tech spending increases in recent history, according to fortune.com.