Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg plans to continue his company’s artificial intelligence spending blitz well into the next year as rival tech giants do the same.

Zuckerberg told analysts Wednesday during a second-quarter earnings call that AI’s rapid pace of progress has informed much of Meta’s recent business decisions, including the company’s $14.3 billion June investment into the data-annotating startup Scale AI as part of a revamped AI strategy involving a wave of high-profile hires.

AI’s swift advancement warrants that Meta have “the absolute best and most elite talent-dense team” that can access the resources they need from a “leading compute fleet,” Zuckerberg said about the AI Superintelligence team he assembled for his company this summer. Whatever these top-tier AI researchers build can then be implemented throughout Facebook, Instagram and the rest of the company’s family of apps, he said.

“When we take a technology, we’re good at driving that through all of our apps and our ad systems,” Zuckerberg said. “There’s no other company that is as good as us at kind of taking something and getting it in front of billions of people.”

Those AI endeavors, however, come at a cost.

Meta on Wednesday said it expects its total expenses for 2025 to come in the range of $114 billion and $118 billion, raising the low end of its previous outlook of between $113 billion and $118 billion. And while Meta is still planning out next year, the company said its AI initiatives will “result in a 2026 year-over-year expense growth rate that is above the 2025 expense growth.”

Other tech giants are also spending heavy on AI projects and talent.

Alphabet said last week during its earnings report that it is raising its 2025 capital expenditures forecast to $85 billion, which is $10 billion higher from its prior forecast. Microsoft said Wednesday that its fiscal first-quarter capital expenditures will be $30 billion, ahead of analyst expectations of $24.23 billion.

For now, investors are OK with Meta’s big AI investments, with the company’s shares up nearly 12% in after-hour trading on Wednesday. It helps that Meta reported strong second-quarter earnings that beat on the top and bottom while providing third-quarter sales guidance that topped Wall Street expectations.

It also helps that Zuckerberg said AI drove “greater efficiency and gains across our ad system,” likely reassuring worried investors that Meta’s big AI spending is leading to some immediate results.

And while the company’s Reality Labs unit continues bleeding money, posting an operating loss of $4.53 billion in the second quarter, the surprise hit of the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses seems to have quelled investor discontent for the time being.

“I continue to think that glasses are basically going to be the ideal form factor for AI, because you can let an AI see what you see throughout the day, hear what you hear, talk to you,” Zuckerberg said. “Once you get a display in there, whether it’s the kind of wide holographic field of view, like we showed with Orion, or just a smaller display that might be good for displaying some information, that’s going to unlock a lot of value, where you can just interact with an AI system throughout the day.”

WATCH: I like Meta as a stock, don’t love it, prefer Google.

Elon Musk’s tunneling venture, The Boring Company, announced plans earlier this week to build a 10-mile underground loop in Nashville, in coordination with Tennessee Republican Governor Bill Lee, who put out a press release praising the project.

Democratic lawmakers in Nashville are demanding answers on the plans, while the state’s Republican leaders have jumped at the chance to partner with Musk. A state commission is holding an emergency meeting and public hearing Thursday morning to discuss a “no cost/mutual benefit” lease arrangement that’s been proposed to help the company get the tunnels started.

“We are aware of the state’s conversations with the Boring Company, and we have a number of operational questions to understand the potential impacts on Metro and Nashvillians,” Freddie O’Connell, Nashville’s mayor, said in an e-mailed statement.

Based in Pflugerville, Texas, The Boring Co. is poised to take over a chunk of public property about the size of a football field in downtown Nashville. The commission that’s meeting on Thursday includes Tennessee’s governor, speaker of the house, speaker of the senate and secretary of state. Members of the public were invited to give testimony but with less than a week’s notice.

On Monday, The Boring Co. and state officials divulged that Musk’s venture would dig its tunnels under state-owned roadways in order to “connect downtown and the Convention Center to Nashville International Airport with a transit time of approximately 8 minutes.”

It’s called the Music City Loop, and the project marks Musk’s latest effort to bolster his budding business empire in Tennessee. His artificial intelligence startup xAI, the parent of social media platform X, is building data centers and a power plant in Memphis, on the western side of the state.

The governor’s office said on Monday that the Nashville project would come “at zero cost to taxpayers” and would be “entirely privately funded,” though no details were provided about whether or what type of cost-benefit analysis, environment, safety or traffic assessment had been completed by the state before agreeing to the deal.

Musk became a major force in Republican politics last year, when he spent almost $300 million to help reelect President Donald Trump before working for the Trump administration in the first few months of this year. Musk brought The Boring Co. CEO Steve Davis with him to lead Trump’s DOGE initiative, slashing federal agencies, regulations and personnel.  

Justin Jones, a Democratic state representative in Nashville, told CNBC on Wednesday that his district had not been able to participate in any public comment period, and hadn’t seen any environmental impact report or health assessment related to the Music City Loop or its construction.

The Boring Co. has previously built tunnels in Las Vegas, including an initial two miles to carry visitors to different exhibit halls around the Las Vegas Convention Center. Tesla drivers travel through the tunnels to pick up and drop off passengers, who book their rides using an app.

The initial loop cost Nevada taxpayers about $50 million and has been criticized for a lack of pedestrian entrances, walkways and platforms, and its limitations relative to a subway system. The Boring Co. was previously fined by the Nevada Occupational Safety and Health Administration for repeated violations and worker injuries in Las Vegas.

The Musk-owned company also abandoned plans to build tunnels in other locations, including Chicago.

One particular concern in Nashville is that the city is prone to flooding with an average annual rainfall of around 50 inches, according to the National Weather Service, which compares to around 4 inches in Las Vegas. The city’s Metro Water Services previously arranged, with federal support, to purchase homes from residents in vulnerable areas at reduced prices, and convert the land there to green spaces.

The Boring Co. has no experience building in areas with that kind of rainfall and flooding concern.

The public hearing to discuss whether the state will give the parking lots to The Boring Co. in a no-cost, mutual benefit lease agreement starts at 8 a.m. local time on Thursday at Cordell Hull State Office Building, according to a copy of the agenda on the state government’s website.

In Memphis, xAI has faced a community backlash over its use of natural gas-burning turbines which power its data center and supercomputer there. The facility, housed in a former home appliance factory, is responsible for training xAI’s controversial chatbot Grok.

The NAACP and other environmental and public health advocates are suing xAI, saying the company exacerbated air pollution in the area, harmed majority-Black communities who live near their facilities, and violated the Clean Air Act. An xAI spokesperson said at the time the groups announced their intent to sue that the company takes “our commitment to the community and environment seriously.”

WATCH: Tesla CEO Elon Musk says he has no plans to merge the automaker with xAI

Samsung Electronics on Thursday reported a second-quarter operating profit of 4.7 trillion Korean won, missing expectations, weighed by a 93.8% profit slump in its chip business.

While Samsung’s second-quarter operating profit beat its own forecast of around 4.6 trillion won, it was a steep drop from the 10.44 trillion won recorded in the same period last year.

The South Korean technology giant posted a quarterly revenue of 74.6 trillion won, up slightly from 74.07 trillion won a year earlier and beating its forecast of 74 trillion won. 

Here are Samsung’s second-quarter results compared with LSEG SmartEstimate, which is weighted toward forecasts from analysts who are more consistently accurate:

• Revenue: 74.6 trillion won ($53.5 billion) vs. 74.43 trillion won 
• Operating profit: 4.7 trillion won vs. 5.33 trillion won

Shares of Samsung fell by as much as 1.79% in early trading.

Notably, its Device Solutions division, which encompasses its memory chip, semiconductor design and foundry business units, recorded a 93.8% drop in operating profit year over year.

Samsung Electronics’ chip business posted an operating profit of 400 billion won in the second quarter, plunging from 6.45 trillion won in the same period last year. Chip revenue fell to 27.9 trillion won, from 28.56 trillion won last year. 

“Inventory value adjustments in memory and one-off costs related to the impacts of export restrictions related to China in non-memory had an adverse effect on profit,” the company said in a statement.

However, speaking in an earnings call, Samsung’s chief financial officer Soon-cheol Park voiced some optimism for the company in the near term.

“Despite ongoing global economic concerns driven by uncertain trade policies and geopolitical tensions, the IT industry appears poised for a gradual recovery fueled by increasing momentum in AI and robotics,” he said.

“In this context, we anticipate a rebound in our performance in the second half, following a bottoming out in the second quarter, with the earnings expected to improve steadily as the year progresses,” he added.

Samsung’s foundry business could receive a boost in the following quarters from a $16.5 billion contract to supply chips to a major company in a deal announced on Monday. 

While Samsung did not initially disclose the counterparty, Tesla CEO Elon Musk has said that it was his American electric vehicle maker, and that the so-called AI6 chips would be made at Samsung’s upcoming fab in Taylor, Texas.  The deal could be even larger than what’s been announced, Musk added. 

The main aim of the Tesla deal for Samsung could be attracting other potential customers to its foundry business, Nam Hyung Kim, research partner and equity research analyst at Arete, told CNBC.

However, “production costs at the Taylor site are expected to be significantly higher than those in Korea,” he said, adding that it is far too early to conclude the deal will improve Samsung’s position against market leader Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company.

Samsung’s foundry business is currently at a “critical juncture between survival and profitability,” Neil Shah, vice president of research at Counterpoint Research, said in a pre-earnings statement.

Samsung, meanwhile, has been dealing with increased competition in its memory business, which makes chips used to store data in everything from servers to consumer devices such as smartphones and laptops. The company has traditionally been the market leader in the space.

But Samsung’s strength in memory is being threatened as it falls behind rival SK Hynix in high bandwidth memory, or HBM — a type of memory used for artificial intelligence computing. 

A report from Counterpoint Research earlier this month found that SK Hynix had caught up with Samsung’s memory revenues in the second quarter, with both now vying for the top position in the global memory market. 

In the second half of the year, Samsung said it plans to proactively meet the growing demand for high-value-added and AI-driven products and continue to strengthen competitiveness in advanced semiconductors.

Samsung successfully defended its leading position in the global smartphone market in the second quarter, according to a report from technology research firm Canalys, now part of Omdia. Samsung claimed a 19% market share by unit sales, predominantly thanks to sales of its Galaxy A series.

Earlier this month, Samsung launched three new folding smartphones as the company looks to keep up with offerings from Chinese rivals.