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Meta reports $825B in future lease and contract commitments

The Next Web (TNW) •
October 22, 2026 • 02:44 PM
• By Cristian Dina
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Meta’s quarterly filing shows about $825bn in future leases and contracts, mostly for data centres and cloud computing for AI.

Meta reports $825B in future lease and contract commitments

Meta has signed up to about $825bn in future leases and contracts, most of them for the data centres and computing power behind its AI push. The figures are in its quarterly filing with US regulators, dated October 22, 2026.

Bloomberg reported the total by adding together three items in the filing. In July, the news agency put Meta’s commitments at almost $700bn.

The largest item is $454.5bn in contracts that Meta cannot cancel. According to the filing, these mostly cover cloud capacity bought from other companies, plus servers and network equipment. They also include energy supply for data centres and hardware for Reality Labs, its virtual reality unit.

About $45.9bn of those contracts fall due in the rest of 2026, and $121.4bn in 2027.

Meta also has $355.7bn in leases that have not started yet, so they do not appear on its balance sheet. They cover data centres, energy infrastructure, shared server space and network equipment. The leases begin between now and 2036 and run for up to 30 years.

The third item is a deal to buy up to $14.7bn of cloud capacity over five years. That amount could shrink if the cloud provider sells the capacity to other customers, the filing says.

The commitments come on top of heavy spending now. In its third-quarter results on Wednesday, Meta said capital expenditure, including finance lease payments, reached $34.9bn in the three months to September 30. Free cash flow was negative $2.1bn.

Meta now expects to spend $135bn to $145bn this year, narrowing an earlier range of $130bn to $145bn.

“Our investments are paying off, the core business is strong, and we’re seeing velocity across the board,” said Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, in the results statement.

At the same time, Meta plans to create non-voting Class C shares , effective from January 19, 2027. The filing says the company expects to use them to sell new shares to investors in the future.

Meta’s shares fell about 3% in pre-market trading on Thursday. The cost of insuring Meta’s debt against default also hit a record. Its five-year credit default swaps reached about 119 basis points, according to ICE Data Services figures cited in market reports.

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