Meta’s good quarter reassures investors about big plans for AI and the Metaverse

Mark Zuckerberg, who has been CEO of Meta (formerly Facebook) for twenty years, has reassured his investors. The stock price did not fall after the new quarterly results were announced.

Thanks to Meta’s financial engine advertising revenue, second-quarter turnover exceeded $39 billion (€36.1 billion), a year-on-year increase of no less than 22%. Net profit increased by 73% to $13.5 billion. Meta is the parent company of Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram.

Meta lost $185 billion in market value during its last quarterly update as investors were shocked by the huge investments Zuckerberg wanted to make. A lot of money is being poured into artificial intelligence (AI) and Zuckerberg’s plans for new virtual universe glasses and headsets. Partly because of this, the company expects to spend no less than $37-40 billion next year. Investors in other tech giants are also worried that all the AI ​​investments will not pay off.

Meta, which is competing against rivals OpenAI, Microsoft and Alphabet to build the most popular AI assistant, has laid off tens of thousands of employees in recent years but has invested billions of dollars in new technology but remains far from profitable.

Zuckerberg explained to analysts on Wednesday the high computing power required to train the next version of Meta’s artificial intelligence language model, Llama 4. “I prefer to build capacity before it’s needed, not when it’s too late.”

Meta insists AI boosts profitability of ad unit

To reassure investors, Meta now insists that profitability in the ad unit is being boosted by artificial intelligence, which can “think” about which ads or videos are relevant to whom in order to keep users glued to the app longer.

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Meta is currently rolling out Meta AI, a digital assistant that people can use to chat on WhatsApp. The program is rolling out first in the United States and is going particularly well in India. Zuckerberg said that by the end of this year, Meta AI is expected to become the most used artificial intelligence assistant in the world.

last year Privacy controversy surrounding Meta AIit turned out that the company wanted to use messages and photos from Instagram and Facebook to train its algorithms. After the interest group None of Your Business complained to 11 European regulators, Meta announced that it would not (for now) use the private data of Facebook and Instagram users in European countries to train its algorithms. It is not clear when the position will come to the Netherlands.

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