ComputeROI: The AI Auditor That Predicts If Billions Make Sense

Meta reported strong Q3 results with revenue up 26% and $20 billion profit, yet its stock plunged 12% after the company raised its 2025 capex forecast to $70-72 billion and signaled even larger spending in 2026, with reports citing as much as $600 billion over three years for AI infrastructure. Investors and analysts pressed CEO Mark Zuckerberg for concrete products and revenue paths but received vague answers about 'superintelligence', frontier models, and unspecified business AI products; the only clear impact cited was modest ad improvements. The post compares this to the Metaverse era when huge Reality Labs spending produced no clear returns and triggered massive value loss, and notes that unlike Microsoft, Google, Nvidia, or OpenAI, Meta lacks a clear monetizable AI product or enterprise cloud channel to justify the scale of spending. The post highlights where the money goes — expensive chips, massive data centers, and top talent — and warns that the circular spending across vendors may not create commensurate economic value, raising systemic risk for markets if investors broadly question AI capex ROI.