Meta Raises AI Spending Forecast as Revenue Growth Stays Strong

Meta’s latest quarter showed a company that can still grow fast enough to absorb an even larger AI bill. Revenue reached $56.311 billion in the first quarter, up 33% from a year earlier, while net income rose 61% to $26.773 billion. But the bigger signal for software executives was the spending outlook: Meta lifted its full-year 2026 capital spending forecast to $125 billion to $145 billion, from a prior $115 billion to $135 billion range.

The scale is striking even by Big Tech standards. Meta said first-quarter capital expenditures totaled $19.84 billion, and its multiyear contractual commitments rose by $107 billion. The company said the higher capex reflects higher component pricing and, to a lesser extent, additional data center costs. It also held its 2026 expense outlook steady at $162 billion to $169 billion and guided second-quarter revenue to $58 billion to $61 billion, a sign that Wall Street will still reward AI-heavy investment if the top line keeps moving.

For monday.com, the message is less about Meta’s product mix than the cost structure now shaping the market. The AI race is getting more expensive, which makes discipline more valuable than hype for most companies. Budget owners inside monday.com, from engineering to product to sales, will be under more pressure to show that AI features do more than signal ambition. They need to prove that the spend shortens service bottlenecks, speeds multi-step work, and lifts measurable team productivity.

That matters because monday.com has already been leaning hard into AI. The company said in February that fourth-quarter 2025 revenue rose 25% to $333.9 million and full-year revenue climbed 27% to $1.232 billion. Customers with more than $50,000 in annual recurring revenue made up 41% of total ARR, and monday vibe became the fastest product in company history to pass $1 million in ARR. Since then, monday.com has announced AI-agent infrastructure and launched Agentalent.ai, a clear sign it wants to be seen as a work platform with embedded AI, not just a project management vendor.

That is the standard Meta helps set. When the biggest companies are willing to spend tens of billions more on infrastructure, smaller software firms get measured on whether their AI features translate into adoption, expansion and retention. monday.com’s next earnings update on May 11 will show whether that story is turning into durable revenue, or just keeping pace with a market that now expects more from every dollar spent on AI.