The social media giant spent $17 billion on capital expenditures during the quarter, mostly on AI infrastructure and data centers and it expects to continue to spend heavily through 2026. Still, Meta’s shares soared 11.5% in after-hours trading after delivering blockbuster second quarter financial results. Revenue cruised 22% higher to $47.5 billion, and its core advertising business generated $46.6 billion in ad revenue across Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger. Daily active users grew to 3.5 billion people and profit margins improved, with net income rising 36% to $18.3 billion compared to last year. 

“The intersection of technology and culture is where Meta focuses,” said Zuckerberg in an Instagram reel defining Meta’s aims for superintelligence. The new lab will focus on developing the next generation of Meta’s models, he said. 

$META CFO signals sharp rise in CapEx for 2026

“.we currently expect another year of similarly significant CapEx $ growth in 2026, as we continue aggressively pursuing opportunities to bring additional capacity online to meet the needs of our AI efforts & business operations” https://t.co/BDmytHqFBA— The Transcript (@TheTranscript_) July 30, 2025

Zuckerberg said the company is building an “elite, talent-dense team,” led by one of the world’s youngest billionaires, Alexandr Wang. 

“I spent a lot of time building this team this quarter,” said Zuckerberg. “The reason so many people are excited to join is because Meta has all of the ingredients required to build leading models and deliver them to billions of people.”

The new superintelligence team will have access to “unparalleled compute” as Meta builds out new gigawatt+ clusters. 

“We’re making all these investments because we have conviction that superintelligence is going to improve every aspect of what we do,” Zuckerberg said.  

Zhao was part of the team behind the original version of OpenAI’s popular chatbot, ChatGPT. He will help lead Meta’s high-profile group, which is aiming to build new AI models that can perform tasks as well as or better than humans. Zhao will report to Alexandr Wang, the former chief executive officer of Scale AI who also joined Meta in June as Chief AI Officer. 

Meta has been spending aggressively to recruit AI experts to develop new models and keep pace with rivals like OpenAI and Google in the race for AI dominance. The company has been looking for a chief scientist for the group for months. Zhao is one of more than a dozen former OpenAI employees who have joined Meta’s AI unit in the past two months. 

“Shengjia co-founded the new lab and has been our lead scientist from day one,” Zuckerberg, Meta’s CEO, wrote in a post announcing the news on Threads. “Now that our recruiting is going well and our team is coming together, we have decided to formalize his leadership role.”

Zhao was a co-author on the original ChatGPT research paper, and was also a key researcher on OpenAI’s first reasoning model, o1, which has helped popularize a wave of similar so-called “chain-of-thought” systems from labs such as DeepSeek, Google, and others. He was listed as one of over 20 “foundational researchers” on the project.

Yann LeCun, another AI researcher who has been at Meta for over a decade and holds the title of chief scientist, will continue to work at the company as chief scientist of an internal AI research group known as FAIR, according to a person familiar with the matter. He will report to Wang, they added.