Is now the time to buy Metaplatform stock? If concerns about monetizing your artificial intelligence investments or waiting for new revenue streams have kept you on the sidelines, two major updates from the company may have just given you the green light. The first incident occurred late Wednesday at Meta’s annual shareholder meeting, when CEO Mark Zuckerberg was asked about a possible move into the public cloud space. What was his reaction? “It’s definitely on the table,” he added. “Almost every week we have different companies coming in from outside and asking us to launch an API (application programming interface) service or asking if we have compute that they can buy at some premium to what we’re paying for it.” When Zuckerberg uses the industry term “compute,” he’s talking about all the data center infrastructure needed to train and run AI workloads. Metacloud? Mr. Zuckerberg’s comments about cloud are important for sentiment as well as for how shareholders like Investing Club think about future growth potential. Recall last month when Meta reported a monster quarter and its stock price plummeted. Indeed, Meta raised its outlook for full-year capital expenditures from between $115 billion and $135 billion to a higher-than-expected range of $125 billion to $145 billion. But the market judged Meta’s higher spending outlook more harshly than Amazon, Alphabet and Microsoft, even though their capital spending guidance was even higher. Wall Street sees Meta as having a higher risk of overbuilding and not optimizing its return on investment because it doesn’t have a public cloud service to rely on. Unlike their mega-cap brethren, the meta has to absorb all the capabilities it is building in-house. The surplus cannot be easily rented out and monetized. The street simply tends to reward people who spend the infrastructure to sell their surplus computing. It also means that there is less pressure on cloud companies themselves to deliver the best possible AI models in every situation. That’s why we offer a wide variety of models. We don’t really care which models our clients use, as long as the demand for these models drives the demand for the computing that they have invested hundreds of billions of dollars in and are currently looking to rent. Starting a public cloud business with Meta requires more investment, and there’s no better way to alleviate spending concerns than by increasing new revenue streams. Premium Tier This is where the second meta update comes into play. The update was provided via a Facebook post by the company’s head of product on Wednesday. In a video message, Naomi Gleit detailed the premium tier of subscription options for Meta’s family of apps, additional tools for businesses and creators, and two new paid options for Meta AI, the company’s large-scale language model. We already knew that Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp were getting a “Plus” subscription tier. This provides users with enhanced ways to interact across the suite. For Facebook and Instagram, the Plus tier costs $3.99 per month. WhatsApp costs $2.99 per month. What’s new is that Meta AI will also have subscription plans. The lower tier, Meta One Plus, costs $7.99 per month, while the upgraded tier, Meta One Premium, costs $19.99 per month. These are for users with more advanced computing needs. The free tier remains for users with more basic needs. Meta will soon begin offering a $14.99/month Meta One Essential plan for creators and business customers, as well as an upgraded Meta One Advanced plan with enhanced ranking and targeting capabilities. The insights into how Meta plans to monetize its multibillion-dollar AI capital investment with cloud services and the push for paid tiers are perhaps signs that Zuckerberg has had enough. The Meta is down nearly 4% year-to-date, while the S&P 500 is up more than 10% and the Nasdaq more than 15%. At Wednesday’s May monthly meeting, Jim Cramer said Mehta’s performance in 2026 was shocking because Zuckerberg is known for his inability to tolerate poor performance. Last month, on a post-earnings conference call, Zuckerberg was asked about his return on invested capital over the next 12 to 24 months. “The fundamental milestones that I’m looking at, like everything we’ve done in the past, are, number one, are we delivering the quality that makes for a technically superior product? And number two, once we have the product, how do we scale it? And thirdly, make sure you’re monetizing and increasing that efficiency towards increasing profitability…I don’t think you’re planning exactly how each product is going to grow month-over-month or anything like that…Muse. I think Spark is a very high-quality model, and it’s now a world-class assistant. We have the ability to grow it and get a lot of engagement. And we’re going to see how our product scales over the next few quarters, and we plan to further monetize it over that period.” ) The success of the Meta AI subscription will depend heavily on Muse Spark’s capabilities, especially as it will put the company in more direct competition with LLM powerhouses such as Google’s Gemini, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and Anthropic’s Claude. The Family of Apps tier focuses on enhancing existing revenue streams from social media. Conclusion While both updates are important, the new Meta AI subscription is likely to be an opportunity for a new revenue stream in the near term, and if we see more of the roadmap here, neocloud’s commentary could prove more important to future revenue projections. The Family of Apps tier is squeezing even more money out of existing social media platforms. While not a complete new product roadmap, the announcement feels like management’s attempt to peek behind the curtain to reassure investors that new revenue streams are definitely a top priority. Neither is likely enough to significantly change near-term earnings expectations. But this update certainly moves the sentiment needle. Will they cause a sustained rise? Time will tell. But a change in how investors think about Meta stocks could be enough to create a floor. With the stock trading at less than 19 times forward earnings estimates, Mehta management was clearly looking to preview monetization opportunities that it was reluctant to discuss before the stock’s recent decline. Remember, long-term investing is not about timing the rise. It’s about identifying undervalued stocks and CEOs who can’t afford losses. In our minds, Mehta and Zuckerberg check both boxes. (Jim Cramer’s charitable trusts are long META, AMZN, GOOGL, MSFT. See here for a complete list of stocks.) As a subscriber to Jim Cramer’s CNBC Investment Club, you will receive trade alerts before Jim makes a trade. After Jim sends a trade alert, he waits 45 minutes before buying or selling stocks in his charitable trust’s portfolio. If Jim talks about a stock on CNBC TV, he will issue a trade alert and then wait 72 hours before executing the trade. The above investment club information is subject to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy, along with our disclaimer. 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