Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg departs the office of U.S. Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) following a meeting at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., U.S., March 26, 2026.
Nathan Howard | Reuters
Meta shares dropped more than 5% in extended trading on Wednesday after the company missed on earnings and issued a weaker-than-expected revenue forecast.
Here’s how the company did, compared with estimates from analysts polled by LSEG:
Earnings per share: $6.18 vs. $7.22 Revenue: $60.80 billion vs. $60.17 billion
Meta said it expects revenue this quarter of between $61 billion and $64 billion, or $62.5 billion at the middle of the range. Analysts were expecting guidance of $63.15 billion, according to LSEG. The company said that the guidance “assumes foreign currency is an approximately 1% headwind to year-over-year total revenue growth, based on current exchange rates.”
The company said that daily active people, or DAP, came in at 3.6 billion, trailing Wall Street estimates of 3.61 billion, according to StreetAccount.
For capital expenditures, Meta narrowed its guidance for the year to between $130 billion and $145 billion from a prior range of $125 billion to $145 billion. With Meta pouring money into artificial intelligencer infrastructure, Meta’s free cash flow dwindled to $784 million in the quarter from $8.55 billion a year earlier.
Last week, rival Alphabet reported that free cash flow turned negative for the first time on record due to the Internet giants hefty AI investments. However, unlike Alphabet and fellow hyperscalers Amazon and Microsoft, Meta doesn’t have a thriving cloud-computing business.
Meta shares are down 11% for the year as of Wednesday’s close, while the Nasdaq is up about 5% over that stretch.
On the earnings call, investors will be listening closely to what Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has to say about the company’s efforts to more directly monetize its various AI-related efforts. Earlier this month, Meta debuted the Muse Spark 1.1 model, which AI chief Alexandr Wang said represents the “strongest model for agentic and coding work yet” and at a cheaper price than offerings from OpenAI and Anthropic.
The company has been aggressively investing in a new AI strategy since hiring Wang in June 2025 in a deal that involved a $14.3 billion investment in Scale AI, Wang’s startup. Meanwhile, Meta is pouring money into AI infrastructure as it tries to keep pace with Alphabet, Amazon and Microsoft when it comes to building data centers and securing AI chips and systems needed to run models and workloads.
Meta said second-quarter total costs and expenses came in at $42.03 billion, representing an increase of 55% from a year ago. That figure includes $2.4 billion of charges related to legal proceedings and $1.18 billion of severance expenses in connection with the company’s layoffs that began in May.
Net income for the period slid 13% to $15.85 billion from $18.34 billion, or $7.14 per share, in the same quarter last year.
Meta’s Reality Labs unit generated $4.6 billion in second-quarter operating losses while bringing in $431 million in sales. Wall Street was expecting that unit, which develops virtual reality and related AI-powered wearable devices, to record a second-quarter loss of $5.07 billion on revenue of $423.4 million.
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