Meta’s stock slumped in after-hours trading on Wednesday, shortly after the tech giant reported earnings per share below Wall Street estimates, while revenue slightly beat expectations.
Shares tumbled further, trading down 9.5% as Meta’s analyst call discussing the results concluded.
Meta is one of the “hyperscalers” spending huge sums on its AI projects, from data centers to its own large language models, and investors are impatient to see what those efforts have yielded.
The answer, according to Meta, is that the billions invested are making its popular apps — Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook, and Threads — more engaging and boosting its advertising engine.
The company’s advertising revenue — its cash cow — rose 27% to $59.36 billion, beating analysts’ $59.07 billion estimate. Ad impressions grew 14%, while the average price per ad climbed 12%.
“AI is accelerating our core business today, powering our next generation of products, and opening the door to entirely new enterprise opportunities,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in an earnings release. “The results are already showing, and I’m optimistic about the potential ahead.”
AI giants’ capex spending has come to dominate investors’ reactions to earnings lately. Alphabet and Tesla set the tone last week with their heightened spending outlooks, causing both stocks to tumble after results.
Meta CFO Susan Li said Meta expects capex to be between $130-145 billion for the year, narrowed slightly from its prior outlook. Wall Street expected about $135.79 billion.
On the analyst call, Zuckerberg talked about his strategy for buying up more AI compute while also renting some capacity out to other businesses, his progress report on Meta’s Superintelligence Lab, the open vs. closed-source AI debate, and more.
Follow along for the full play-by-play of Meta’s analyst call:
