MENLO PARK, July 30 -- On Tuesday evening, the number that rattled Meta Platforms investors was not on the revenue line. Revenue of $60.8 billion for the second quarter grew 28 percent from a year earlier, a rate most companies would treat as the headline. Meta framed it that way. Wall Street's attention landed somewhere else.

Free cash flow for the quarter came in at $784 million, down from $8.5 billion in the second quarter of 2025. That is not a rounding error or a seasonal quirk. It is what happens when a company generating record advertising revenue redirects most of the proceeds into infrastructure at a scale that dwarfs its own recent history. Capital expenditure in the quarter reached approximately $31 billion, part of a full-yea...