Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta Platforms Inc., wears Meta Oakley Vanguard AI glasses during the MetaConnect event on Wednesday, September 17, 2025 in Menlo Park, California, USA.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
meta The company is scheduled to report first-quarter earnings after the bell Wednesday.
Here are the forecasts of analysts surveyed by LSEG:
Earnings per share: Estimated $6.79 Revenue: Estimated $55.45 billion
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has spent the past three months furthering his company’s push into artificial intelligence, following a strategic shift and talent overhaul that began in June with a $14.3 billion investment in Scale AI and the hiring of CEO Alexandr Wang.
Mr. Zuckerberg brought Mr. Wang on board to lead the company’s revamped AI division, the Meta Superintelligence Lab, to oversee the creation of new models that would help Meta compete with OpenAI, Anthropic and Google.
Earlier this month, Meta debuted Muse Spark as its first proprietary underlying model. Investors will be hoping that Zuckerberg will begin to lay out a clearer strategy for monetizing the company.
While Wall Street waits, Meta’s core advertising business is booming. Analysts expect total revenue, almost entirely from advertising, to rise 31% from $42.3 billion a year earlier. If that happens, it would be the fastest quarter of growth since 2021.
Meta’s advertising power shows that the company is benefiting from advances in AI, even if it hasn’t found new revenue streams yet.
Meta’s AI efforts are supported by significant spending related to the company’s large-scale data center construction program. Meta’s capital expenditures in the first quarter are expected to be $27.63 billion, according to StreetAccount.
In its fourth-quarter earnings report in January, Meta predicted capital spending this year would be between $115 billion and $135 billion. Meta’s hyperscaler peers — alphabet, Amazon and microsoft — is also reporting after the bell on Wednesday, and is expected to update investors on its spending plans for the first time since February, when the war between the U.S. and Iran began, sending oil prices soaring.
While increasing spending, Meta is also cutting staff. Last week, the company announced it would lay off 8,000 people, or about 10% of its workforce, and would no longer be hiring for 6,000 open positions. These layoffs follow layoffs in January that affected about 1,000 people in the company’s Reality Labs division and another layoff in March that affected hundreds of staff in areas including Facebook, global operations, and sales.
Analysts expect Reality Labs, its virtual reality and augmented reality division, to report a first-quarter operating loss of $488.8 million on revenue of $488 million.
What to watch: Retail investors expect strong returns from Meta, says Cboe’s JJ Kinahan.
