How much has Meta committed to in future leases and contracts?

Meta has committed to about $825 billion in future leases and contracts, most of it tied to the data centers and computing power behind its artificial intelligence push. The figures appear in a quarterly filing with U.S. regulators dated October 22, 2026.

Bloomberg arrived at the total by adding together three items in the filing. In July, the news agency had put Meta's commitments at almost $700 billion.

How much of Meta's commitments can the company not cancel?

The biggest piece is $454.5 billion in contracts that Meta cannot cancel. According to the filing, those mostly cover cloud capacity bought from other companies, along with servers and network equipment. They also include energy supply for data centers and hardware for Reality Labs, the company's virtual reality unit. About $45.9 billion of those contracts fall due in the rest of 2026, and $121.4 billion comes due in 2027.

Another $355.7 billion sits in leases that have not yet started, which means they do not appear on Meta's balance sheet. The leases cover data centers, energy infrastructure, shared server space and network equipment. They begin at various points between now and 2036 and run for up to 30 years.

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

How is Meta's spending affecting its free cash flow?

The commitments land on top of spending that is already heavy. In its third-quarter results released Wednesday, Meta said capital expenditures, including finance lease payments, reached $34.9 billion in the three months ended September 30. Free cash flow was negative $2.1 billion. The company now expects to spend between $135 billion and $145 billion this year, narrowing an earlier forecast range of $130 billion to $145 billion.

Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg presented the spending as a payoff. “Our investments are paying off, the core business is strong, and we’re seeing velocity across the board,” he said in the results statement.

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

Markets responded with caution. Meta's shares fell about 3% in premarket trading Thursday. The cost of insuring the company's debt against default also reached a record, with five-year credit default swaps hitting about 119 basis points, according to ICE Data Services figures cited in market reports.

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