Meta

Meta Platforms (formerly Facebook) is one of the world's largest technology companies, founded by Mark Zuckerberg in 2004. Meta operates Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Threads — platforms that collectively serve over 3 billion daily active users worldwide.

Meta has become one of the most important players in AI through its open-source Llama model family and the Meta AI assistant. Llama models (including Llama 4 Maverick and Llama 4 Scout with a 10 million token context window) are the most widely used open-weight language models in the world. In April 2026, Meta announced Muse Spark — its new proprietary flagship model from Meta Superintelligence Labs, a new organization led by Alexandr Wang (former Scale AI CEO, hired via a $14.3 billion deal). Muse Spark accepts voice, text, and image inputs and powers Meta AI across all Meta platforms. This marks a strategic shift: while the Llama series remains open-weight, Meta's most capable model is now proprietary.

Meta One is Meta's paid subscription brand, spanning Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, and the Meta AI app. Meta AI remains free for casual users. Meta One Plus runs $7.99 per month, with a $19.99 Meta One Premium tier above it that unlocks deeper thinking-mode reasoning and expanded image and video generation. Two creator and business tiers — Meta One Essential at $14.99 and Meta One Advanced at $49.99 — round out the lineup. The shift marks Meta's first revenue stream for AI beyond advertising, a structural change for a company whose AI strategy had previously been defined by the choice to monetize through ads rather than subscriptions.

Meta has also signaled a move into premium AI agents with Hatch, an announced consumer agent that builds software tools and handles tasks like scheduling and email from plain-language prompts. A consumer version of Meta's OpenClaw agent, Hatch is expected to launch in the US around July 2026 with free and premium tiers, and Meta is reportedly weighing a price of up to $200 a month for the top tier — which would make it the company's first standalone paid AI agent, positioned directly against premium subscriptions from OpenAI and Anthropic.

Meta's 2026 AI capital expenditure is projected at $115 to $135 billion — among the largest infrastructure investments by any company. To control that spend, Meta is building its own AI accelerators: the MTIA program’s fourth-generation chip, code-named Iris — designed with Broadcom and manufactured by TSMC — is slated to enter production in 2026 to supplement, not replace, the Nvidia and AMD GPUs Meta buys in bulk, as the company scales toward roughly 14 gigawatts of compute by 2027. The company's FAIR research lab continues producing influential AI research. Llama 4 Behemoth (288 billion active parameters) has been deprioritized in favor of the Muse Spark roadmap.

Meta is also moving to monetize its enormous data-center buildout directly. The company began developing Meta Compute, a cloud infrastructure business that would sell access to raw AI computing power and to Meta's own models — including Muse Spark — putting it in competition with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. Because Meta earns little direct revenue from its models today, renting out excess capacity is a way to recoup its infrastructure spend, echoing similar compute-leasing moves by SpaceX's xAI unit. The effort is led by infrastructure chief Santosh Janardhan alongside Meta Superintelligence Labs' Daniel Gross and company president Dina Powell McCormick, and marks Meta's push to turn a cost center into a business. That buildout is now crossing borders: in July 2026 Meta announced a roughly 10 billion dollar, one-gigawatt data center north of Edmonton, Alberta — its first in Canada and its 33rd worldwide — expected online within three years. Meta has described the strategy as renting surplus graphics chips to outside customers between its own AI training runs, treating idle compute like empty airline seats.