On January 28th, Eastern Time, Meta Platforms (META) announced its financial results for the fourth quarter and full year of fiscal 2025. The report indicated that several of the company’s core metrics significantly exceeded market expectations, primarily due to the strong driving force of artificial intelligence technology on its advertising business. In the fourth quarter, the company achieved revenue of $59.89 billion, a year-over-year increase of 24%; earnings per share (EPS) were $8.88, surpassing market expectations. For the full year of 2025, the company’s annual revenue surpassed the $200 billion mark for the first time, reaching $200.97 billion, with annual capital expenditures as high as $72.2 billion.
Core business performance remained robust. The quarterly daily active users of Meta’s family of apps climbed to 3.58 billion, a 7% increase year-over-year. Empowered by AI technology, the efficiency of ad recommendation algorithms improved, driving a year-over-year increase of 18% in ad impressions. Simultaneously, the average price per ad rose by 6% against the trend. During the earnings call, CEO Mark Zuckerberg emphasized that the company is moving toward an era of “personal hyper-intelligence.” By deeply integrating generative AI into its advertising systems and wearable devices, the company has translated technological investments into tangible revenue growth momentum. Zuckerberg outlined his strategy centered on “pre-deployed” computing capacity, aimed at accumulating the necessary infrastructure, computational power, and talent to achieve the company’s superintelligence goal—a theoretical milestone where AI reaches or surpasses human levels in many tasks.
However, the company’s massive plans for future investments have become a key focus for the market. According to guidance provided in the financial report, Meta expects its capital expenditures for 2026 to reach between $115 billion and $135 billion, a scale far exceeding the market’s prior expectation of approximately $110.6 billion. These funds will primarily be used for the expansion of hyperscale data centers and the procurement of high-end computing chips to support the growing demands for AI model training and inference. Zuckerberg had previously publicly committed to investing $600 billion in the United States by 2028 to support artificial intelligence technology, infrastructure, and workforce expansion. Last October, CFO Susan Li warned that 2026 capital expenditures would be “significantly higher” than those in 2025, mainly due to increased infrastructure costs—a statement that initially sparked investor concerns.
There are market doubts about whether such large-scale investments can yield substantial returns. Following the earnings release, despite concerns that the massive expenditure guidance might dilute profit margins, Meta’s stock price rose over 7% in after-hours trading, buoyed by better-than-expected revenue performance and optimistic guidance for continued operating profit growth in 2026. Currently, Meta is in a phase of fully investing its cash flow, generated by its core advertising business, to catch up with the AI wave. As the company plans to further push into the AI assistant market and launch new smart glasses in 2026, the balance between its high capital expenditures and future profitability will continue to be a critical factor influencing its long-term valuation.
