MENLO PARK, July 30 -- Mark Zuckerberg delivered Meta Platforms Inc. (META) its best revenue quarter in company history on Wednesday. The stock fell more than four percent when markets closed.

The disconnect between those two facts has a specific dollar amount. Meta generated $31.9 billion in cash from its operations during the three months ended June 30. After the company spent $31.1 billion on data centers, chips, and the sprawling AI infrastructure Zuckerberg has staked the company's future on, $784 million remained. That is free cash flow. In the same quarter last year, the figure was $8.5 billion.

Revenue came in at $60.8 billion, a 28 percent increase from the prior year and approximately $620 million above the Wall Street consens...