{"id":718059,"date":"2026-07-29T22:59:11","date_gmt":"2026-07-29T22:59:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/718059\/"},"modified":"2026-07-29T22:59:11","modified_gmt":"2026-07-29T22:59:11","slug":"meta-stock-tanks-in-jittery-market-on-massive-ai-investment-mixed-q2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/718059\/","title":{"rendered":"Meta Stock Tanks In Jittery Market On Massive AI Investment, Mixed Q2"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tMeta<\/a> shares plunged more than 8% in the after market as it said it plans to invest between $130 billion and $145 billion on AI this year.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe parent of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp also missed Wall Street\u2019s Q2 earnings<\/a> per share forecast and anticipated softer than expected revenue in the current third quarter.<\/p>\n

\n\tRevenue for the three months ended in June, however, jumped 28% from the year before to $60.8 billion. That beat forecasts as advanced AI boosts Meta\u2019s key digital advertising business, which accounts for almost all of its sales. Ad impressions rose 14% across its family of apps and average price per ad increased 12%. Yet the looming question investors have about Meta and others in the space is whether the ongoing massive spending on data centers and chips to build out AI capacity justifies the gains. <\/p>\n

\n\tMeta in particular is coming from behind trying to compete with OpenAI, Anthropic and Google.<\/p>\n

\n\tOn Tuesday, it announced a venture with BlackRock to build a $14 billion data center in El Paso, Texas along with facilities in rural Louisiana and in Alberta, Canada. Meta began to ramp up aggressively after hiring Alexandr Wang to head its renamed Meta Superintelligence Labs in June 2025, including a $14.3 billion investment in his startup, Scale AI. \u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tConcerns over whether the return justifies the spend has been killing tech stocks lately. Meta was already down 10% year to date before the numbers.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cAI is accelerating our core business today, powering our next generation of products, and opening the door to entirely new enterprise opportunities,\u201d said CEO Mark Zuckerberg. \u201cThe results are already showing, and I\u2019m optimistic about the potential ahead.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe company had 3.6 million Daily Active People (DAP), its preferred user metric, for the three months ended in June. <\/p>\n

\n\tMeta earnings<\/a> hit shortly after a press conference by new Federal Reserve chief Kevin Warsh that spooked markets. The Fed left interest rates unchanged at its July policy meeting but three of the 12 members of the Federal Open Market Committee voted for a rate hike and Warsh said he wouldn\u2019t hesitate to raise rates if inflation continues to run ahead of the central bank\u2019s 2% target. <\/p>\n

\n\tSurging oil prices have been driving inflation higher as the U.S.-Iran war drags on. Higher rates hit consumers and companies across the board but big tech especially hard given the level of new investment.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe Dow Jones Industrial Average fell over 1,000 points after Warsh spoke in its worst trading day of the year. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Meta shares plunged more than 8% in the after market as it said it plans to invest between…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":718060,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[84,12055,59,1324,49152,99341,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-718059","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-business","tag-earnings","tag-gb","tag-meta","tag-meta-ai","tag-meta-earnings","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/718059","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=718059"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/718059\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/718060"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=718059"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=718059"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=718059"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}