What happened
Meta Platforms reported $56 billion in revenue for the first quarter of 2026 and raised its full-year capital expenditure guidance to $145 billion, according to the company's release as covered by CryptoBriefing on Friday. The prior guide, set in late January, ran in the $100-105 billion range. Zuckerberg tied the increase directly to what he called a superintelligence initiative, language he first used on the Q4 2025 call but has now backed with a number. Operating margin held in the mid-40s. Reality Labs losses, the perennial drag, were not the story this quarter. The story is the build.
For context, $145 billion is more than the combined 2025 capex of ExxonMobil and Chevron. It is also roughly seven times what the entire publicly listed Bitcoin mining sector spent on infrastructure last year. Meta did not break out how much of the $145 billion lands in 2026 versus carryover into 2027, but the company did say the spending is weighted toward GPU clusters, custom silicon, and the power and cooling to run them.
Why it matters
The headline is a tech earnings beat. The second-order read is an energy and infrastructure story that crypto markets have been tracking for two years. Hyperscaler capex was already the single biggest tailwind for the high-performance compute pivot inside Bitcoin mining, where operators like Core Scientific, Iris Energy, Hut 8, and Cipher Mining have signed multi-year colocation deals to host AI workloads next to existing hashrate. Meta's $145 billion guide tells those operators the bid for grid-connected, cooling-ready capacity is not normalising in 2026. It is accelerating.