{"id":249679,"date":"2025-10-29T23:24:12","date_gmt":"2025-10-29T23:24:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/249679\/"},"modified":"2025-10-29T23:24:12","modified_gmt":"2025-10-29T23:24:12","slug":"meta-reports-mixed-financial-results-amid-spree-of-ai-hiring-and-spending-meta","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/249679\/","title":{"rendered":"Meta reports mixed financial results amid spree of AI hiring and spending | Meta"},"content":{"rendered":"

Meta reported mixed financial results for the third quarter of 2025. The company brought in record quarterly revenue but reported a major tax bill that dampened earnings per share, the company announced on Wednesday. The financial results come as Meta<\/a> ends a multibillion-dollar hiring spree focused on artificial intelligence talent.<\/p>\n

The tech giant earned $51.24bn in quarterly revenue, beating Wall Street\u2019s expectations and the company\u2019s own projections for third-quarter sales. However, it reported earnings per share (EPS) of $1.05, far below Wall Street expectations of $6.70 in EPS. The major drop was due to a one-time non-cash income tax charge of $15.93bn. The EPS would have been $7.25 without this one-time charge, the company said.<\/p>\n

The report, and the scheduled investor call, gives investors another opportunity to find out whether the company\u2019s lavish spending on AI infrastructure is justified. The company projected full-year total expenses would be between $116 to $118bn, upping the lower end of the range from $114bn. The company also expects 2025 capital expenditures to be between $70 and $72bn, up from a previously projected range of $66 and $72bn. Meta said its fourth-quarter revenue would likely fall somewhere between $56 and $59bn.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe had a strong quarter for our business and our community,\u201d said Mark Zuckerberg, Meta\u2019s founder and CEO. \u201cMeta Superintelligence Labs is off to a great start and we continue to lead the industry in AI glasses. If we deliver even a fraction of the opportunity ahead, then the next few years will be the most exciting period in our history.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jesse Cohen, senior analyst at Investing.com<\/a>, said the latest report reveals \u201cthe growing tension between the company\u2019s massive AI infrastructure investments and investor expectations for near-term returns\u201d.<\/p>\n

Spending is not expected to slow down any time soon, however. On the earnings call, Susan Li, the company\u2019s chief financial officer, said Meta will need to \u201cinvest aggressively\u201d in 2026 to meet the company\u2019s computational needs. Earlier this month, the company announced a new joint venture with Blue Owl Capital that would help the firms build and finance the new $27bn Hyperion data center campus in Louisiana, the biggest Meta is involved in developing.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe also anticipate total expenses will grow at a significantly faster percentage rate in 2026 than 2025, with growth driven primarily by infrastructure costs, including incremental cloud expenses and depreciation,\u201d Li said. \u201cEmployee compensation costs will be the second largest contributor to growth, as we recognize a full year of compensation for employees hired throughout 2025, particularly AI talent, and add technical talent in priority areas.\u201d<\/p>\n

When asked about how the company is balancing releasing products that will show near-term returns on investment with these larger research-focused projects, Zuckerberg that Meta AI is a \u201cmassive latent opportunity\u201d and pointed to the company\u2019s ability to bring its new products to billions of users.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe research is going to enable technological capabilities to exist and then those capabilities can get built into all kinds of different products,\u201d Zuckerberg said.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s the first financial update since Meta said it planned<\/a> to lay off 600 staffers from its AI unit \u2013 the same unit the company went on a spending and hiring spree to restructure and fill with the top AI talent from other companies. The company said the layoffs were an effort to reduce the bloat within the company\u2019s \u201csuper-intelligence\u201d unit and brought the number of employees there down to just under 3,000.<\/p>\n

Zuckerberg said the investment into Meta\u2019s Superintelligence Labs helped the company build what he described as \u201cthe highest talent density lab in the industry at this point\u201d.<\/p>\n

The company\u2019s stock has been on a steady rise over the past six months. Its previous two earnings reports have beaten Wall Street expectations. The wider US stock market likewise reached record highs the week.<\/p>\n

Meta also launched its new Ray-Ban Display glasses last month, which feature a screen embedded in the lenses, and analysts were eager to hear sales figures. But the unit responsible for these glasses as well as Meta\u2019s virtual reality headsets posted a massive $4.4bn loss. Zuckerberg said the company\u2019s collaborations with Ray-Ban and Oakleys on these AI glasses were going well and that these investments will likely be very profitable. Meta\u2019s original camera glasses, simply dubbed Meta Ray-Bans, proved to be a popular gadget. Both types of glasses have already prompted privacy concerns. While Meta has designed the glasses not to work if a light that notifies people that the glasses are recording is covered, a $60 modification can disable the light, 404 Media reported.<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cI suspect these glasses, in particular, will predominantly appeal to early \u2018tech-curious\u2019 adopters, and that scheduled demos will far outpace sales,\u201d said Mike Proulx<\/a>, Forrester VP, research director.<\/p>\n

On the advertising side, Meta lost its accreditation from the Media Rating Council, a non-profit that sets industry wide standards for brand safety, after the company decided to pull out of the organization\u2019s annual audits. The accreditation signals to advertisers that the content on the platform that their ads may appear next to would not be harmful to their brand. Meta received the accreditation just four months before it was stripped.<\/p>\n

Analysts were optimistic that the loss of accreditation would not ultimately hurt Meta\u2019s ability to attract advertisers.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhile this may raise eyebrows among advertisers, it won\u2019t deter them from investing in Meta due to its sheer audience reach and brand reliance,\u201d Proulx said. \u201cBrands will overlook potential brand safety risks as long as their Meta media investments continue to perform.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Meta reported mixed financial results for the third quarter of 2025. The company brought in record quarterly revenue…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":249680,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,105],"class_list":{"0":"post-249679","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-au","12":"tag-australia","13":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249679","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=249679"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249679\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/249680"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=249679"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=249679"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=249679"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}