Quick Read – Meta spent $19B on capex in Q1 2026 while delivering 33% revenue growth and holding 41% operating margins, killing the AI spending bear thesis. – META’s 30-day post-earnings return of 17% nearly doubled QQQ’s 9%, rewarding concentrated exposure over the index…
ternative. – Reality Labs burned $4B in Q1 2026, but analysts still target $823 for META against a $646 price, preserving the bull case. – Act now: the analyst who called NVIDIA in 2010 just named his top 10 AI stocks — and Meta didn’t make the cut. Grab the names FREE today
I keep building a position in Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META), and every quarter the case for adding more gets stronger, not weaker. The bear thesis I heard for eighteen months, that AI capital spending would eat the margins alive, has now been tested against real numbers. The numbers won.
The Capex Panic Was Priced in Fear Q1 2026 was the quarter the argument should have broken. Meta spent $18.997 billion on capex, up 46.8% year over year, and raised full-year guidance to $125 to $145 billion. And yet revenue grew 33.08% to $56.311 billion, operating income climbed 30.29%, and free cash flow stayed positive at $12.386 billion.