new york
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If meta investors are concerned about artificial intelligence infrastructure and huge spending on talent – And its ambitious “super intelligence” goal – could soften Wednesday's blockbuster revenue report. As one analyst said, the results show that “AI is becoming a real revenue driver, not just hype.”
On Wednesday, Meta recorded profit of $7.14 per share with revenue of $47.5 billion since the quarter ended June 30th. Earnings per share rose 38% from the same period last year, far surpassing the $5.88 forecast by Wall Street analysts.
It also predicts revenue from the current quarter to $50.5 billion ahead of analyst expectations.
A strong result was that Meta rose more than 9% in after-hours trading. The company's shares have risen 16% since its launch this year.
“Meta's blown revenue and procurement guidance highlights that AI is becoming a real revenue driver, not just hype. “The company's ongoing investment in AI infrastructure shows that it's playing a long game.”
The report comes after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg laid out his approach to AI's “Superintelligence” in a Wednesday morning video and blog post. He hopes everyone has access to their personal AI super intelligence, he said in a blog post.
“Our business continues to function very well, allowing us to invest heavily in our AI efforts,” Meta said in a call with analysts Wednesday night, adding that the company's performance over the quarter could be attributed to improvements in AI's core advertising business.
Meta is paying a lot of money to recruit top AI talent from new Meta Superintelligence Labs teams from rivals such as Openai, Google, and Apple. The company is also spending hundreds of millions of dollars building large AI data centers.
On Friday, Zuckerberg announced that Shengjia Zhao, one of the co-creators of ChatGpt, who hired Meta from Openai a few weeks ago, will become the team's chief scientist.
Meta Chief Financial Officer Susan Lee said employment in “high-priority” areas such as AI is expected to increase the company's total staff this year and throughout this year. She added that investments in Meta's top AI talent have led to increased pay increases as it will be the second biggest cost growth for next year.
Meta is a theoretical point in the league with the high-tech giants such as Openai, Google, and Anthropic, where everything is theoretically point of making AI smarter than all humans with all knowledge work. If we reach that milestone, it is believed that it could dramatically reshape the economy and how people work, creating important new business opportunities for businesses that can deliver technology.
And the interest may be particularly high for Zuckerberg, who has refocused it on AI after a failed pivot to metaverse. The company is under pressure to provide billions of dollars invested in data centers and chips, and also has a growing smartglass business that relies on the success of AI efforts. And the company is coming from a bit behind its competitors after it was reported that it released the largest version of its new Llama 4 AI model.
Zuckerberg said Wednesday morning that he believes smart glasses will become the “main computing device” of the AI era.
Despite aggressive spending, Meta said Wednesday that its third quarter capital expenditure was $17 billion, roughly in line with Wall Street's estimate of $16.4 billion. And it narrowed it down – but not raised – that full year capital expenditure guidance gave investors a more accurate view of its spending plan.
