Meta Platforms Sales Soar to Record, Bolstering Zuckerberg’s AI Spending Spree
Revenue grows to $48.4 billion, helping fuel chief executive’s bets on augmented reality and artificial intelligence
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Meta Platforms posted record revenue in the fourth quarter, aided by artificial-intelligence improvements to its ads business.
The Facebook and Instagram parent reported a 21% increase in sales and $20.8 billion in net income, both ahead of analyst expectations.
Meta estimated that revenue growth would slow in the January-to-March quarter, reaching 8% to 15%, a level that would represent the lowest increase in two years.
Meta operates a suite of AI products, including an open-source model called Llama that developers can use to create their own applications, and AI chatbots embedded in its apps. The company is also planning to create an AI engineer that will start contributing increasing amounts of code to its research and development projects. Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg wants Meta AI to be the leading assistant in the world in 2025.
Meta plans to spend 65 billion on capex this year, in part to build out a data center in Louisiana that is “so large it would cover a significant part of Manhattan,” Zuckerberg said. It also expects to end the year with more than 1.3 million graphics processing units, commonly known as GPUs.
The company’s Reality Labs unit, which oversees its investments in smart glasses, augmented reality and the so-called metaverse, reported losses of nearly 17.7 billion last year.
Meta reported “daily active people” of 3.35 billion in December 2024, up 5% from the prior year.
In the third quarter, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon and Alphabet collectively spent almost 60% more on AI data centers compared with a year prior. They are expected to announce even more spending in the latest round of earnings reports that started this week.
Beyond increased spending, Meta more broadly is going through a transition and has sought to align itself with the new Trump administration. The company donated $1 million to President Trump’s inaugural fund, and Zuckerberg himself visited Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate twice in recent months ahead of attending the president’s inauguration. He also went on Joe Rogan’s podcast and criticized the Biden administration.
Earlier this month, Meta said it was eliminating its third-party fact-checker program in the U.S., relaxing restrictions on speech allowed on its platforms and phasing political content back into its users’ feeds.
It also appointed a new Republican head of global policy, dismantled its team assigned to diversity and said it plans to ax 5% of workers in performance-based job cuts.
TikTok’s future in the U.S. remains in flux. Meta would likely be a beneficiary if the U.S. were to fully enforce a law banning its Chinese-owned competitor. TikTok’s users would likely spend more time on Meta-owned Instagram and more ad dollars would likely flow to Meta’s platforms, analysts have said.
Meta’s X competitor Threads is also starting to test ads on the app in the U.S. and Japan, the company said Friday.
Write to Meghan Bobrowsky at meghan.bobrowsky@wsj.com
Appeared in the January 30, 2025, print edition as ‘Meta’s Sales Soar, Lifted By Spending’.