Meta has locked itself into roughly $825bn in future lease and contract commitments, primarily funding the data centers and compute infrastructure driving its artificial intelligence push, Bloomberg reported.
Regulatory Filings Reveal Massive Compute Commitments
The staggering figures emerge from a quarterly filing submitted to US regulators on October 22, 2026. Bloomberg calculated the $825bn total by aggregating three distinct liability items outlined within the documentation. This represents a substantial escalation from July, when commitments sat at nearly $700bn.
The largest component consists of $454.5bn in non-cancellable contracts. These commitments cover acquired cloud capacity from external providers, servers, networking hardware, data center energy supply, and hardware for Reality Labs, the company’s virtual reality division. Out of these binding obligations, about $45.9bn falls due across the remainder of 2026, with an additional $121.4bn scheduled for 2027.
Unstarted leases form the second category, totaling $355.7bn. Because these leases have not yet commenced, they remain off the balance sheet. They encompass data center sites, energy infrastructure, shared server space, and network equipment. These agreements activate between now and 2036, spanning durations of up to 30 years.
A third agreement involves purchasing up to $14.7bn of cloud capacity over a five-year window. The filing notes this figure could decrease if the cloud provider successfully offloads capacity to alternative customers.
Meta Reports Negative Free Cash Flow
These forward-looking commitments arrive alongside intense near-term spending. In its third-quarter results released on Wednesday, Meta reported that capital expenditure, including finance lease payments, hit $34.9bn during the three months ending September 30. Free cash flow dropped into negative territory at negative $2.1bn.
Meta narrowed its full-year capital expenditure guidance to a range of $135bn to $145bn, tightening an earlier projection of $130bn to $145bn. Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg defended the outlay in the earnings statement. Our investments are paying off, the core business is strong, and we’re seeing velocity across the board,
Zuckerberg said.
Meta Plans Non-Voting Class C Shares
Meta shares fell approximately 3% in pre-market trading following the filing release. Simultaneously, the expense of insuring Meta debt against default reached record levels, with five-year credit default swaps climbing to about 119 basis points according to ICE Data Services market figures.
