Meta Inc. CEO Mark Zuckerberg attends a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on online child sexual exploitation at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, U.S., January 31, 2024.
Nathan Howard | Reuters
meta platformThe company’s shares fell more than 10% on Thursday as skepticism about the payoff of the company’s aggressive artificial intelligence spending plans overshadowed strong results.
The social media giant has raised its capital spending outlook for 2025 as it races with competitors to build advanced AI tools. Meta now expects capital expenditures to be in the range of $66 billion to $72 billion, compared with its previous outlook of $66 billion to $72 billion.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg defended the company’s ambitious spending plans during an earnings call Wednesday.
“It’s quite early, but I think we’re starting to see gains in our core business,” he said. “This gives us a lot of confidence that we should invest even more, and we want to make sure we don’t underinvest.”
Zuckerberg said the company is “aggressively” pre-emptively building capabilities in preparation for the arrival of superintelligence, and that Meta is “ideally positioned for a generational paradigm shift on a number of big opportunities.”
Like its competitors, Meta has spent billions of dollars to enhance its AI services in the face of increased competition, but that’s not all. on wednesday, alphabet Increased capital spending forecast from $91 billion to $93 billion; microsoft He said he expected spending growth to increase this year.
Earlier this year, Meta invested $14.3 billion in AI startup Scale AI and brought in its CEO Alexandr Wang to lead an AI initiative called Superintelligence Labs with former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman.
Meta also has several new cloud deals to build out its AI infrastructure.
For the third quarter, Meta reported adjusted earnings of $7.25 per share on revenue of $51.24 billion, beating Wall Street expectations.
Sales rose 26% year over year, and the company reported $15.93 billion in taxes due to the implementation of President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
—CNBC’s Jonathan Vanian contributed reporting
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