Meta Needs to Stop Spending as If It’s a Cloud Giant: Dave Lee

The AI hyperscalers are lumped together for obvious reasons, but after the four largest reported their earnings on Wednesday night, it became abundantly clear that one of these big-spending giants is not like the others.

Shares of Meta Platforms Inc., the night’s biggest loser, were down 7% in after-hours trading as Mark Zuckerberg counted the cost of declaring yet another capex increase. The latest estimate calls for as much as $145 billion for the year, up from the last forecast of up to $135 billion.

That spending is in the same arena as the other cloud businesses. Except, Meta isn’t ...