Meta Platforms has moved $2.04 billion of land and partly built data-centre assets into “held-for-sale” status, signalling plans to offload them to a third party within the next year so the two sides can co-develop facilities that will power the company’s artificial-intelligence systems. Chief Financial Officer Susan Li said Meta is exploring external financing for some projects to gain flexibility as infrastructure needs evolve. The decision highlights the ballooning cost of generative-AI infrastructure across the industry. Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft and Meta together spent roughly $88 billion on capital expenditure last quarter alone, led by Amazon’s $32 billion outlay. Forecasts compiled by analysts show the four companies intend to pour about $364 billion into servers, chips and data centres in 2025, while The Economist estimates total global spending on related infrastructure will reach $2.9 trillion by 2028. Demand for computing power is already running ahead of supply. Amazon’s chief executive said the company has “more demand than we have capacity,” an assessment echoed by finance chiefs at Microsoft and Google. Rising costs are prompting tech giants to seek partnerships, tap capital markets and, in Meta’s case, monetise real-estate holdings to fund expansion. The cash burn extends beyond hardware. In a sign of intensifying competition for talent, Meta has reportedly agreed to pay 24-year-old AI researcher Matt Deitke about $250 million to join its Superintelligence Labs team. The combination of record capital budgets and eye-catching pay packages has led Wall Street analysts to warn that infrastructure spending is becoming a stress point even for Silicon Valley’s most profitable companies.