Meta (META+0.60%) surpassed Wall Street’s expectations with fourth-quarter earning results driven by artificial intelligence, smart glasses, and social media.
The tech giant reported revenues of $48.4 billion for the fourth quarter of 2024 — a 21% increase year over year. Meta reported earnings per share of $8.02, and net income of $20.8 billion. The company’s full year revenue was $164.5 billion — up 22% from the previous year.
Meta was expected to report revenues of $47 billion for the quarter ended in December, according to analysts’ estimates compiled by FactSet. Net income was estimated to be $17.4 billion, while earnings per share was expected at $6.75.
First quarter revenue guidance was set between $39.5 billion and $41.8 billion — slightly above expectations of $41.7 billion.
The company’s shares were up by around 0.8% in after-hours trading on Wednesday, after closing up by 0.32%. Meta’s stock is up by about 15.5% so far this year.
“We continue to make good progress on AI, glasses, and the future of social media,” Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement. “I’m excited to see these efforts scale further in 2025.”
Last week, Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post that the tech giant is planning to invest between $60 billion and $65 billion in capital expenditures on AI this year. The Meta chief said he expects Meta AI to “be the leading assistant serving more than 1 billion people” in 2025, and that the company’s Llama 4 model is expected to “become the leading state of the art model.” The company also plans to “build an AI engineer” that can contribute more code to its research and development efforts, he said.
Zuckerberg said Meta is building a data center with a capacity of more than two gigawatts — a site that could cover a large part of Manhattan — to power its AI expansion. The data center will bring around one gigawatt of compute power online in 2025, Zuckerberg said, adding that Meta will have more than 1.3 million graphics processing units (GPUs) by the end of this year.
Meta — which owns Facebook, Instagram, and Reality Labs — also has plans to “significantly” grow its AI teams, Zuckerberg said, and has “the capital to continue investing in the years ahead.”
Earlier this month, Zuckerberg sent a message to company managers about reducing headcount by 5% — or about 3,600 jobs, Bloomberg reported. The cuts are aimed at “low-performers” who will reportedly be replaced later in the year.
“We typically manage out people who aren’t meeting expectations over the course of a year, but now we’re going to do more extensive performance-based cuts during this cycle,” Zuckerberg reportedly said in the internal message.
In September, Zuckerberg unveiled new devices and AI features at Meta’s annual Connect conference, including the company’s open-source, multimodal Llama 3.2 large language models, and updates to the second iteration of the company’s Ray-Ban (EL-0.67%) smart glasses. He also showed off the first fully-functioning prototype of the company’s Orion augmented reality glasses.
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