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Meta (META) is expected to release its fourth-quarter earnings results at the end of the trading day on Wednesday.
The tech giant’s stock was up by 1.7% at the market close on Friday at $11.04 per share.
The company is expected to report revenues of $47 billion for the fourth quarter of 2024, according to analysts’ estimates compiled by FactSet (FDS). Net income is estimated to be $23.3 billion for the quarter ended in December, while earnings per share is expected to be $6.75.
On Friday, Meta chief executive Mark 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 in 2025.
Zuckerberg said he expects Meta AI to “be the leading assistant serving more than 1 billion people” in 2025, and he added that Meta’s Llama 4 model is expected to “become the leading state of the art model” this year. The company also plans to “build an AI engineer” that can contribute more code to its research and development efforts, he said.
To support the AI expansion, Zuckerberg said the company is building a data center with a capacity of more than two gigawatts — a site that could cover a large part of Manhattan. The data center will bring around one gigawatt of compute power online in 2025, Zuckerberg said, and Meta will have more than 1.3 million graphics processing units (GPUs) by the end of the year.
Meta plans to “significantly” grow its AI teams, Zuckerberg said, and has “the capital to continue investing in the years ahead.”
Earlier this month, Meta — which operates Facebook, Instagram, and Reality Labs (formerly Oculus VR) — sent a message to company managers about reducing headcount by 5%, affecting 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.
Meanwhile, the Meta chief has introduced new company policies, such as cutting back on moderation and scrapping the platform’s fact-checking system, as he’s grown closer with the Trump administration.