Mark Zuckerberg tells investors Meta’s AI investments are accelerating every part of the business; and to IRS, Meta says: Our AI data centers are an experiment that could fail

Mark Zuckerberg has spent two years telling investors that Meta’s AI spending is paying off across Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook. When the company files its taxes, it tells the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) a very different story. According to a New York Times report, Meta describes its AI data centers to the IRS as a large experiment that may not work.

That framing lets Meta claim the Research and Experimentation Tax Credit, a break Congress created in 1981 to reward risky innovation. The payoff has been big.