“We expect the significant infrastructure footprint we are building will not only help us meet the demands of our business in the near term, but also provide us an advantage in the quality and scale of AI services we can deliver.”

In context

“pital allocation. Our primary focus remains investing capital back into the business, with infrastructure and talent being our top priorities. Starting with headcount, our hiring continues to be targeted at technical roles within our company priorities. In the first quarter, the significant majority of the roughly 2,800 employees we added were to support our priorities of monetization, infrastructure, generative AI, regulation and compliance, and Reality Labs. On infrastructure, we have two primary focuses to meet the growing compute needs of our services and AI initiatives. The first way is by significantly scaling up our infrastructure footprint. Our CapEx growth this year is going toward both generative AI and core business needs, with the majority of overall CapEx supporting the core. We expect the significant infrastructure footprint we are building will not only help us meet the demands of our business in the near term, but also provide us an advantage in the quality and scale of AI services we can deliver. We continue to build this capacity in a way that grants us maximum flexibility in how and when we deploy it to ensure we have the agility to react to how the technology and industry develop in the coming years. The second way we're meeting our compute needs is by increasing the efficiency of our workloads. In fact, many of the innovations coming out of our ranking work are focused on increasing the efficiency of our systems. This emphasis on efficiency is helping us deliver consistently strong returns from our core AI initiatives. For example, we shared on the Q3 2024 call that improvements to our AI-driven feed and video recommendations drove a roughly 8% lift in time spent on Facebook and a 6% lift on Instagram over the first nine months of last year. Since then, we've been able to deli”