Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is sounding a familiar tune when it comes to artificial intelligence: better to invest too much than too little.

On his company’s third-quarter earnings call on Wednesday, Zuckerberg addressed Meta’s hefty spending this year, most notably its $14.3 billion investment in Scale AI as part of a plan to overhaul the AI unit, now known as Superintelligence Labs.

Some skeptics worry that the spending from Meta and its competitors in AI, namely OpenAI, is fueling a bubble.

For Meta’s newly formed group to have enough computing power to pursue cutting-edge AI models, the company has been building out massive data centers and signing cloud-computing deals with companies like Oracle, Google and CoreWeave.

Zuckerberg said the company is seeing a “pattern” and that it looks like Meta will need even more power than what was originally estimated. Over time, he said, those growing AI investments will eventually pay off in a big way.

“Being able to make a significantly larger investment here is very likely to be a profitable thing over, over some period,” Zuckerberg said on the call.

If Meta overspends on AI-related computing resources, Zuckerberg said, the company can repurpose the capacity and improve its core recommendation systems “in our family of apps and ads in a profitable way.”

Along with its rivals, Meta boosted its expectations for capital expenditures.

Capex this year will now be between $70 billion and $72 billion, compared to prior guidance of $66 billion to $72 billion, the company said.

Meanwhile, Alphabet on Wednesday increased its range for capital expenditures to $91 billion to $93 billion, up from a previous target of $75 billion to $85 billion. And on Microsoft’s earnings call after the bell, the software company said it now expects capex growth to accelerate in 2026 after previously projecting slowing expansion.

Alphabet was the only one of the three to see its stock pop, as the shares jumped 6% in extended trading. Meta shares fell about 8%, and Microsoft dipped more than 3%.

Zuckerberg floated the idea that if Meta ends up with excess computing power, it could offer some to third parties. But he said that isn’t yet an issue.

“Obviously, if you got to a point where you overbuilt, you could have that as an option,” Zuckerberg said.

In the “very worst case,” Zuckerberg said, Meta ends up with several years worth of excess data center capacity. That would result in a “loss and depreciation” of certain assets, but the company would “grow into that and use it over time,” he said.

As it stands today, Meta’s advertising business continues to grow at a healthy pace thanks in part to its AI investments.

“We’re seeing the returns in the core business that’s giving us a lot of confidence that we should be investing a lot more, and we want to make sure that we’re not under investing,” Zuckerberg said.

Revenue in the third quarter rose 26% from a year earlier to $51.24 billion, topping analyst estimates of $49.41 billion and representing the company’s fastest growth rate since the first quarter of 2024.

WATCH: Meta reports Q3 earnings beat, company takes one-time tax charge.

Google parent Alphabet is planning a “significant increase” in spend next year as it continues to invest in AI infrastructure to meet the demand of its customer backlog, executives said Wednesday.

The company reported its first $100 billion revenue quarter on Wednesday, beating Wall Street’s expectations for Alphabet’s third quarter. Executives then said that the company plans to grow its capital spend for this year.

“With the growth across our business and demand from Cloud customers, we now expect 2025 capital expenditures to be in a range of $91 billion to $93 billion,” the company said in its earnings report. 

It marks the second time the company increased its capital expenditure this year. In July, the company increased its expectation from $75 billion to $85 billion, most of which goes toward investments in projects like new data centers.

There’ll be even more spend in 2026, executives said Wednesday.

“Looking out to 2026, we expect a significant increase in CapEx and will provide more detail on our fourth quarter earnings call,” said Anat Ashkenazi, Alphabet’s finance chief.

The latest increases come as companies across the industry race to build more infrastructure to keep up with billions in customer demand for the compute necessary to power AI services. Also on Wednesday, Meta raised the low end of its guidance for 2025 capital expenditures by $4 billion, saying it expects that figure to come in between $70 billion and $72 billion. That figure was previously $66 billion to $72 billion.

Google executives explained that they’re racing to meet demand for cloud services, which saw a 46% quarter-over-quarter growth to the backlog in the third quarter.

“We continue to drive strong growth in new businesses,” CEO Sundar Pichai said. “Google Cloud accelerated, ending the quarter with $155 billion in backlog.”

The company reported 32% cloud revenue growth from the year prior and is keeping pace with its megacap competitors. Pichai and Ashkenazi said the company has received more $1 billion deals in the last nine months than it had in the past two years combined. 

In August, Google won a $10 billion cloud contract from Meta spanning six years. Anthropic last week announced a deal that gives the artificial intelligence company access to up to 1 million of Google’s custom-designed Tensor Processing Units, or TPUs. The deal is worth tens of billions of dollars.

The spend on infrastructure is also helping the company improve its own AI products, executives said on the call.

Google’s flagship AI app Gemini now has more than 650 million monthly active users. That’s up from the 450 million active users Pichai reported the previous quarter. 

Search also improved thanks to AI advancements, executives said. Google’s search business generated $56.56 billion in revenue — up 15% from the prior year, tempering fears that the competitive AI landscape may be cannibalizing the company’s core search and ads business.

AI Mode, Google’s AI product that lays within its search engine, has 75 million daily active users in the U.S., and those search queries doubled over the third quarter, executives said. They also reiterated that the company is testing ads in that AI Mode product.

WATCH: Google catching up with Meta pulled on shares following earnings, says D.A. Davidson’s Gil Luria

ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott pushed back against the idea that artificial intelligence technology will make enterprise software redundant in a Wednesday interview with CNBC’s Jim Cramer.

“We realize the world needs access to the great hyperscalers, and so we integrated with all three of them. So that’s a cooperative,” McDermott said. “The world’s going to benefit from the large language model providers, but they don’t do what we do.”

As AI continues to develop, some on Wall Street are worried that companies will be able to rely solely on automated models — making many enterprise software companies’ products obsolete.

ServiceNow makes software for companies including the National Hockey League, FedEx, Ulta Beauty and AstraZeneca.

McDermott detailed some of the functions of ServiceNow’s platform, including management of assets, operations and security.

ServiceNow’s software is needed to perform complex functions — such as regulatory environment processes for financial services firms with decades-old legacy technology — McDermott suggested. He brushed off specific concerns that systems of record, which store data and information, might be “eaten by AI.”

He indicated that agentic AI isn’t up to the task of entering the “already complex environment.”

“Those agents are being sold into silos, and that’s the very reason why AI won’t work,” McDermott said. “AI is a cross-functional sport.”

McDermott also explained why ServiceNow proposed a five-for-one stock split on Wednesday during earnings.

“I feel strongly that we’re right now ready for more than just institutional investors,” he said. “We know the consumer investor wants in, and I don’t want you to have to buy fractional shares and go through all that.”

ServiceNow topped expectations when it reported after close, and shares jumped more than 4% in extended trading.