Meta plans to pump billions more into AI investments this year, despite noting that millions of users appear to have begun to abandon its platforms. In a phone call on Wednesday, Meta said that numbers for “family daily active people” – the term Meta coined for all collective users of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp or Messenger – were down by 20 million in this quarter compared to the previous three months.
Meta attributes this fall to “the internet outage in Iran, as well as restrictions on access to WhatsApp in Russia.” It’s up to you whether you take Meta seriously, since by aggregating user statistics together across all of its platforms, we can’t tell which ones are most affected. If I wanted to obscure the fact that a leading social platform is likely bleeding users on a daily basis, that’s certainly what I would do.
This decrease comes at a time when Meta says it is increasing its expected capital expenditures for 2026 to between $125 and $145 billion, that is, $10 billion more than previous estimates. This increased spending is due to expectations of higher component prices and, to a lesser extent, the additional costs of future data center capacity. This is a course correction, according to Meta’s CFO, Susan Lee, who said on an investor call that Meta “underestimated our computing demand in the past.”
Meta revenue also saw its fastest growth since 2021, increasing 33 percent, from $42.3 billion at this time last year to $56.3 billion this quarter. Some divisions, though, are not doing so well – the Reality Labs unit, which makes wearables and virtual reality devices, reported an operating loss of $4.03 billion during the three-month quarter, and it comes on the heels of Meta’s Reality Labs employees having been hit by two waves of layoffs since January.
Meta’s stock price is down more than 7 percent at the time of writing, compared to where it was before the company’s earnings announcement.
