Meta Is Minting a New Stock Class to Keep Its AI Spending Spree Going

Meta is creating an entirely new class of stock, and the reason is simple: its AI ambitions are getting expensive enough that the company wants another way to pay for them. The news came buried in Meta's third-quarter earnings report on Wednesday, where the company disclosed plans to issue non-voting shares that will help fund AI projects, cover potential acquisitions, and pay employees. Trading won't actually begin until 2027.

It's a notable move for a company that, like most major tech firms, has historically relied on cash flow, debt, and its existing stock to finance big bets. A new share class gives Meta a separate financial instrument it can tap without touching the voting structure that keeps Mark Zuckerberg firmly in control of the company. Non-voting shares let Meta raise capital or compensate employees while leaving ownership and decision-making power exactly where it is now.

Meta framed the move in blunt terms. "The scale of investment required to compete, sustain growth, expand infrastructure, and pursue new strategic initiatives amidst the AI transformation taking place in the industry is significant," the company said in its press release. CFO Susan Li put it more directly on the earnings call, saying the new shares will "expand our funding tools and give us flexibility to invest behind the unprecedented momentum we're seeing across every part of our business driven by AI."

That "momentum" comes with a price tag. Meta now expects capital expenditures of between $135 billion and $145 billion this year, up from its earlier guidance of $130 billion to $145 billion. That money is going toward the data centers Meta has been racing to build (and loudly promoting), the AI talent it's been poaching from rivals like OpenAI, and the models it needs to keep pace with competitors building their own frontier AI systems. A new stock class suggests Meta sees that spending curve continuing, if not steepening, well past this year.

A busy, bumpy stretch for Muse

The earnings news lands in the middle of a chaotic few weeks for Meta's AI push, centered on Muse, the AI agent the company launched in September. Muse is designed to handle the kind of digital busywork people put off: sorting through a cluttered inbox, booking a restaurant reservation, planning a trip. It's the same basic pitch as other AI agents flooding the market right now, but Meta's version found an audience fast. The Muse app climbed to the top of app store charts shortly after launch and crossed 10 million downloads in the US this week, according to the company. Meta also rolled out an upgraded Muse Wonder model in the same window.

That momentum has come with real friction, though. A tech YouTuber reported that Muse disclosed his home address to a stranger on Facebook Marketplace, a privacy lapse that raises obvious questions about how much personal information these agents are willing to hand over and to whom. Separately, researchers found that chats from Muse's conversation-sharing feature were publicly accessible on the open web, prompting Meta to pause that feature entirely while it sorts out the exposure.

Those two incidents don't derail Muse's download numbers, but they're the kind of early stumbles that tend to follow fast consumer AI rollouts, where companies push products out quickly to capture attention and then patch privacy holes after the fact. For an agent explicitly designed to handle sensitive tasks like email and personal scheduling, the margin for error on data handling is thin, and Meta has already tested it twice in its first month.

Why the new shares matter

Zoom out and the share class and the Muse rollout are two sides of the same story. Meta is spending aggressively to build AI infrastructure and ship AI products fast, and it's now restructuring its own finances to make sure it can keep doing both. Non-voting stock is a tool other companies have used before to raise money without diluting the influence of founders or insiders, and Meta's version appears built with the same goal: bring in capital for AI investment and employee pay without reopening questions about who actually controls the company.

The 2027 trading start date means this isn't an immediate fix for near-term cash needs. It's a longer-horizon move, one that signals Meta expects its AI costs to stay elevated for years rather than tapering off once the current infrastructure buildout is done. Combined with the bumped-up capex guidance, it paints a picture of a company that sees AI spending as a multi-year commitment rather than a short-term surge.

What happens next will say a lot about how this plays out. Meta still has to work out the structural details of the new share class before it starts trading in 2027, and Muse's privacy stumbles will test how carefully the company manages an AI agent that's growing faster than its guardrails. Both threads, financial and product, point to the same underlying reality: Meta is all in on AI, and it's now rebuilding parts of its own balance sheet to prove it.