“We expect 2023 capital expenditures to be in the range of $27 billion to $29 billion, updated from our prior estimate of $27 billion to $30 billion.”

In context

“2024. First, we expect higher infrastructure-related costs next year. Given our increased capital investments in recent years, we expect depreciation expenses in 2024 to increase by a larger amount than in 2023. We also expect to incur higher operating costs from running a larger infrastructure footprint. Second, we anticipate growth in payroll expenses as we work down our current hiring underrun and add incremental talent to support priority areas in 2024, which we expect will continue to shift our workforce composition toward higher-cost technical roles. Finally, for Reality Labs, we expect operating losses to increase meaningfully year-over-year due to our ongoing product development efforts in AR/VR and our investments to further scale our ecosystem. Turning now to the capex outlook. We expect 2023 capital expenditures to be in the range of $27 billion to $29 billion, updated from our prior estimate of $27 billion to $30 billion. We anticipate our full-year 2024 capital expenditures will be in the range of $30 billion to $35 billion, with growth driven by investments in servers, including both non-AI and AI hardware, and in data centers as we ramp up construction on sites with the new data center architecture we announced late last year. On to tax. Absent any changes to US tax law, we expect our fourth quarter 2023 and full-year 2024 tax rates to be similar to the third quarter of 2023. Please note that our outlook for 2024 expenses, capital expenditures and tax rate are preliminary estimates. In the future, we expect to provide our forward -- our initial forward year expense, capex and tax rate outlooks on the fourth quarter call. In closing, this was a good quarter for our business as our efficiency efforts are”