Meta Platforms forecast
third-quarter revenue well ahead of Wall Street expectations on
Wednesday and raised the lower end of its capital expenses
forecast for the year, sending its shares up 10% in extended
trading.
For the third quarter, Meta said it expected total revenue
of $47.5 billion to $50.5 billion, compared with analysts’
average estimate of $46.17 billion, according to data compiled
by LSEG.
The company said in a statement that its third-quarter
guidance assumed a 1% benefit from a weak dollar.
Meta expects both total expenses and capital expenditures to
increase significantly in 2026, driven primarily by higher
infrastructure costs and continued investment to support AI
initiatives.
“AI-driven investments into Meta\u2019s advertising business
continue to pay off, bolstering its revenue as the company pours
billions of dollars into AI ambitions like superintelligence,”
said eMarketer senior analyst Minda Smiley. “But Meta\u2019s
exorbitant spending on its AI visions will continue to draw
questions and scrutiny from investors who are eager to see
returns.”
Smiley added that Meta’s strong results signaled that the
broader digital advertising market was not yet feeling the pain
from tariffs.
U.S. antitrust regulators have sued Meta to force it to
restructure or sell Instagram and WhatsApp, claiming the company
sought to monopolize the market for social media platforms used
to share updates with friends and family. With court papers due
in September, the judge overseeing the case is unlikely to rule
until later this year at the earliest.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified in April that the company was
initially slow to recognize the competitive threat of TikTok,
and that Meta has over the years tried to build many apps that
never gained traction.
Meta said on Wednesday that while it was not providing an
outlook for fourth-quarter revenue, the company expected the
year-over-year growth rate in the period to be slower than in
the third quarter.
The social media giant raised the lower end of its annual
capital expenditures forecast by $2 billion, driven by its
high-stakes push for “superintelligence” in the heated AI race.
The Facebook and Instagram parent now expects capital
expenditures to be between $66 billion and $72 billion.
Training and deploying advanced AI systems remain a
capital-intensive endeavor, requiring costly hardware, massive
computing resources and top-tier engineering talent.
After a lackluster reception for its Llama 4 model that led
to staff departures, Meta has tried to revitalize its AI push by
sparking a high-stakes talent war that has seen it dole out more
than $100 million pay packages to researchers from rival firms.
Zuckerberg has pledged to spend hundreds of billions of dollars
to build massive AI data centers, having shelled out $14.3
billion for a stake in startup Scale AI and poached its
28-year-old billionaire CEO Alexandr Wang.
To fund the push, the billionaire founder is leaning on
Meta’s massive user base as well as AI-powered improvements in
content engagement that make it a stable bet for advertisers
even in times of economic uncertainty.
The tech giant recently introduced an AI-driven
image-to-video ad creation tool under its Advantage+ suite,
allowing marketers to generate video ads from static images.
Instagram, whose Reels product competes with ByteDance’s
TikTok and YouTube Shorts for ad dollars in the popular short
video format, is set to account for more than half of Meta’s ad
revenue in the U.S. this year, according to research firm
eMarketer.
Meta has also accelerated efforts to monetize its social
media platforms WhatsApp and Threads by integrating ads.
The company last month named insider Connor Hayes as head of
Threads, a sign it was moving the platform away from Instagram’s<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Meta Platforms forecastthird-quarter revenue well ahead of Wall Street expectations onWednesday and raised the lower end of its capital expensesforecast for the year, sending its shares up 10% in extendedtrading.For the third quarter, Meta said it expected total revenueof $47.5 billion to $50.5 billion, compared with analysts’average estimate of $46.17 billion, according to data compiledby […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31888","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\n