Meta tops Q3 forecasts as AI spending drives first negative free cash flow in over a decade

Capital expenditures of $34.91 billion outran operating cash flow in the third quarter, even as revenue jumped 26% Meta Platforms just spent more money than its business brought in. For a company that has printed cash for over ten years, that is a genuinely unusual sentence to write. The social media giant reported negative free cash flow of $2.12 billion for the third quarter of 2026, its first quarterly dip below zero in over a decade. The culprit is no mystery: an aggressive push to build out artificial intelligence infrastructure. For the quarter ending September 30, Meta generated $32.79 billion in operating cash flow. Capital expenditures, however, came in at $34.91 billion. The gap between those two figures is exactly where the negative $2.12 billion comes from.

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