TL;DR: A New Mexico judge ordered Meta to pay $25 billion on October 21, 2026, over the Cambridge Analytica data scandal, in what Attorney General Raúl Torrez called one of the largest state court verdicts against a company in American history. Judge Francis Mathew of the First Judicial District Court in Santa Fe set the figure after a jury found more than 43 million violations of the state’s Unfair Practices Act. New Mexico had asked for $35 billion to $40 billion; Meta wanted the number capped at $3.45 billion. Meta says it will appeal, and the money is earmarked for the state’s education fund.
We’ve been following this case since a Santa Fe jury first sided with New Mexico in September and again when the state asked for up to $40 billion in penalties earlier this month. There is now an actual number, and it lands well above what most people expected a single judge to order on their own. Here is what Judge Mathew decided, how the figure was reached, and what Meta plans to do next.
What Judge Mathew ordered
On Wednesday, Judge Francis Mathew of the First Judicial District Court in Santa Fe ordered Meta to pay $25 billion in civil penalties, according to CBS News and ABC News. The ruling closes out the penalty phase of a lawsuit New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez’s office originally filed against Meta in 2021. Speaking at an unrelated news conference, Torrez called the judgment “the single largest, if not the largest, single state verdict against the company in American history,” and said the money goes into New Mexico’s education fund.
The ruling has not been published alongside a detailed written opinion explaining how Judge Mathew moved from the jury’s findings to a specific dollar figure, so the exact reasoning behind $25 billion rather than some other number inside the range is not yet public.
How the case got here
New Mexico’s case always traced back to the original Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which the British political data firm obtained information harvested from a Facebook personality quiz and ultimately covering an estimated 87 million profiles worldwide, without proper consent, for political ad targeting. As we covered when the Santa Fe jury first ruled against Meta in late September, jurors examined 29 specific statements Meta made to users about its privacy and misinformation practices and found 26 of them misleading, a finding that translated into more than 43 million separate violations of the state’s Unfair Practices Act once weighed against how many New Mexico Facebook users saw each statement.
When we covered the penalty fight earlier this month, New Mexico was asking the court for $35 billion to $40 billion, while Meta argued the state never proved any specific resident changed their behavior because of the statements and wanted penalties capped at $3.45 billion. Judge Mathew’s $25 billion order lands below the state’s ask but more than seven times above Meta’s proposed ceiling.
The math behind the $25 billion
New Mexico’s Unfair Practices Act allows penalties of up to $5,000 per violation. Multiplied against the jury’s 43-million-violation finding, that formula theoretically exposed Meta to more than $219 billion, a ceiling nobody involved, including the state, ever expected a court to actually impose. The real fight was always over where inside that enormous range the final number would land.
| Figure | Where it came from |
|---|---|
| $219 billion | Theoretical ceiling: 43 million-plus violations times the $5,000 statutory maximum |
| $35 billion to $40 billion | What New Mexico actually asked the judge to order |
| $3.45 billion | The cap Meta argued for, saying the state never proved individual harm |
| $25 billion | What Judge Mathew ordered on October 21, 2026 |
Even at $25 billion, the judgment dwarfs every prior privacy penalty tied to this scandal. The Federal Trade Commission’s 2019 settlement with Facebook over Cambridge Analytica and related privacy lapses totaled $5 billion, and the European Union’s largest-ever GDPR fine against Meta, issued by Ireland’s data regulator in 2023 over EU-to-US data transfers, came to roughly $1.3 billion. New Mexico’s number is several times larger than both combined, from a single state rather than a federal agency or an entire bloc of countries.
Meta says it will appeal
Meta Chief Legal Officer C.J. Mahoney told ABC News the company will appeal and is “confident we will prevail.” Mahoney also argued the ruling “makes it all but impossible to do business in the state of New Mexico,” a line that signals Meta plans to challenge both the size of the penalty and the legal theory behind it, not just ask an appeals court to trim the number.
New Mexico’s decision to fight this out in court rather than settle also sets it apart. ABC News reports that 48 other states resolved similar Cambridge Analytica-era claims against Meta through settlements, while New Mexico chose to litigate on its own. Years ago, some states, New Mexico included, had already turned down an $18 billion nationwide settlement over the scandal because they considered it too small. This verdict is the clearest evidence yet that the holdout states made the right call.
What happens next
An appeal means the $25 billion figure is not final. Meta’s filings will likely attack both the per-exposure method New Mexico used to count violations and the constitutionality of a penalty this size relative to any provable harm, arguments the company has raised in other privacy litigation before. New Mexico, for its part, now has a real number to defend rather than a theoretical range.
Other state attorneys general who considered suing Meta separately, instead of joining the earlier nationwide settlement, will be watching how this verdict holds up on appeal. A number this large, if it survives review, changes the calculation for any state weighing litigation over a tech company’s privacy practices going forward.
The bottom line
Eight years after Cambridge Analytica first became a scandal, a single state court just put a bigger price tag on it than the FTC, the EU, or anyone else ever has. $25 billion is less than New Mexico wanted and far more than Meta offered, which is usually a sign a number is close to defensible, but Meta’s planned appeal means this fight is not over. For a company that reports tens of billions in revenue every quarter, the number itself may matter less than what it signals to every other state attorney general still deciding whether to sue.
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