Meta AI Spending Spree Set to Top $600 Billion Over 3 Years. Which Stocks Will Get a Boost.

Meta Platforms is planning to build data centers with more than 10 times as much power as current high-end sites. (Courtesy Meta)

Meta Platforms is set to spend more than half a trillion dollars on its artificial-intelligence ambitions in just the next three years. A raft of stocks could benefit from the wave of investment.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Sunday that it was “quite possible” his company could invest more than a planned $600 billion in the U.S. through 2028 if AI progress keeps accelerating, in a post on the company’s social-media platform Threads.

The initial spending commitment was made publicly at a dinner with President Donald Trump last week. Zuckerberg added on Threads that planned investment through to 2030 would be “significantly higher.”

So who’s in line to gain from the spending spree? Firstly, AI chip makers Nvidia and Broadcom . Meta is one of the biggest customers for Nvidia’s processors and has previously said it expects to end the year with more than 1.3 million graphics processing units (GPUs) to fill several multi-gigawatt data center clusters.

But it isn’t just Nvidia chips the company will be splashing out on. Meta said earlier this year it was expanding the use of its in-house MTIA chips—developed jointly with Broadcom—into some areas where Nvidia’s GPUs have been used, such as AI training.

There are other data-center infrastructure players that are likely to benefit. Barron’s has recently highlighted Arista Networks and Astera Labs as plays on the data-center boom, as makers of the gear that connects servers together. Credo Technology Group is another in the space, and it reported impressive earnings last week.

For other stocks with the potential to gain, it’s worth looking at the energy needs of Meta’s data centers. Pipeline company Williams won approval in June to build a natural-gas power plant near Columbus, Ohio, that will plug directly into a Meta data center. The same project will use a significant amount of power equipment provided by heavy-machinery company Caterpillar .

Meta also in June announced a 20-year deal to source energy from a Constellation Energy nuclear plant in Illinois. At the time, Zuckerberg’s company said it was receiving proposals for its goal to add one to four gigawatts of new nuclear generation capacity in the U.S. starting in the early 2030s.

At the moment, Meta’s enthusiasm for nuclear energy is good news for Constellation and its peer in large-scale plants, Vistra. But eventually companies working on small modular reactor designs—which include NuScale Power, Oklo, and BWX Technologies —could be in line for deals.

As for Meta’s stock, so far the market isn’t being put off by Zuckerberg’s big spending ambitions. The stock was up 29% so far this year through to Friday’s close.

Write to Adam Clark at adam.clark@barrons.com