Meta reported second-quarter free cash flow of $784 million, down 91% from $8.55 billion a year earlier, after capital expenditures reached $31.08 billion, according to the earnings release filed with the SEC for the quarter ended June 30.
The drop is entirely a spending story. Cash flow from operations rose about 25% year over year to $31.86 billion, the filing shows. Meta calculates free cash flow as operating cash flow minus purchases of property and equipment and principal payments on finance leases, and that deduction consumed nearly everything the business generated in the quarter.
Meta reported the results on July 29 and posted the figures in a press release on its investor relations site. The company has directed its capital budget toward data centers, servers and network infrastructure to support its AI workloads.
A year earlier, the same free cash flow calculation left the company with $8.55 billion after capex. The gap between the two quarters is roughly $7.77 billion, all of it attributable to the expanded investment line rather than to weaker operations.
Meta is not alone on the spending side of the ledger. Amazon, Alphabet and Tesla each reported negative free cash flow in their latest quarterly results, according to their own earnings reports, as the largest US technology companies fund concurrent AI infrastructure buildouts.
Capital expenditures absorbed 97.5 cents of every dollar of the $31.86 billion Meta generated from operations in the quarter. Operations produced more cash than a year ago, and free cash flow still fell by a factor of roughly eleven, so the compression sits on one line of the cash flow statement and Meta controls that line.
The number that decides the next quarter is Meta's capex figure in its third-quarter release, due in late October. If Meta again spends above $31 billion while operating cash flow holds near $32 billion, free cash flow prints under $1 billion for a second consecutive quarter.
