Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg demonstrates Muse, Meta’s artificial intelligence agent, at the Meta Connect event in Menlo Park, California, on September 23, 2026.
Min Connors | Bloomberg | Getty Images
meta is scheduled to report third-quarter results after the bell on Wednesday, and investors will be looking for signs that the company’s latest artificial intelligence efforts will boost future sales.
Here are the forecasts of analysts surveyed by LSEG:
Earnings per share: $5.75 Revenue: $63.2 billion
It was a big quarter for Mark Zuckerberg’s company, driven by the early success of its Muse AI personal assistant tool, which debuted in September and shot to the top of Apple’s iOS app store. This AI momentum helped Meta finish September as the best month on Wall Street since 2022.
Meta isn’t the first company to create a digital assistant that can organize people’s emails or scan the web for headphone deals, but its empire, which includes Facebook and Instagram, has helped introduce AI agents to the masses. At the same time, Meta and its head of AI Alexandr Wang have continued to rapidly roll out new foundational models and related updates, including Muse Wonder, which was released last Monday.
Wall Street will likely be watching to see if Meta plans to increase data center-related capital spending, or capital spending, to further develop the underlying computing infrastructure needed to power its AI agents and underlying models.
In its second-quarter results in July, the company said it had reduced its 2026 capital spending outlook to a range of $130 billion to $145 billion, an increase of $5 billion from the lower end of its previous range. As a result of these expenditures, Meta’s free cash flow for the period decreased to $784 million from $8.55 billion in the same period last year.
Analysts expect Meta’s capital spending to rise to $196.3 billion by 2027, according to FactSet.
According to StreetAccount, Meta is expected to have 3.65 billion daily active users (DAP) in the third quarter, roughly flat from the previous quarter. This number represents all of Meta’s users across its family of apps, including Facebook and Instagram.
