Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta Platform Inc., wears a pair of Meta Oakley Vanguard AI glasses during the Meta Connect event in Menlo Park, California, U.S., on Wednesday, Sept. 17, 2025.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | getty images
meta Will report first-quarter earnings after the bell on Wednesday.
Here’s what analysts surveyed by LSEG are expecting:
- earnings per share:$6.79 estimated
- Income: Estimated at $55.45 billion
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has spent the past three months pushing his company deeper into artificial intelligence following a shift in strategy and talent that he kicked off in June with a $14.3 billion investment in Scale AI and the appointment of CEO Alexander Wang.
Zuckerberg brought Wang in to lead his company’s revamped AI unit, Meta Superintelligence Labs, and oversee the creation of new models that could make Meta more competitive with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.
Earlier this month, Meta introduced the Muse Spark as its first proprietary foundation model. Investors will now be looking to Zuckerberg to lay out a clear strategy towards monetization.
While Wall Street waits, it’s getting plenty of growth from Meta’s core advertising business. Analysts expect total revenue, almost all of which comes from advertising, to rise 31% from $42.3 billion a year earlier. This will be the strongest quarter for growth since 2021.
Meta’s advertising strength shows that the company is benefiting from its advances in AI, even if it has not yet found new revenue sources.
Underpinning Meta’s AI efforts is spending tied to the company’s massive data center buildout plans. Meta’s capital spending for the first quarter is expected to be $27.63 billion, according to StreetAccount.
In its fourth-quarter earnings report in January, Meta estimated capital spending for the year would be between $115 billion and $135 billion. Meta’s hyperscaler peers – alphabet, Amazon And Microsoft — are also reporting after the bell on Wednesday, and will update investors on their spending plans for the first time since the U.S.-Iran war began in February, sending oil prices soaring.
As expenses are increasing, Meta is also cutting the number of employees. The company said last week it was laying off about 10% of its workforce, or 8,000 employees, while no longer hiring for 6,000 open roles. The cuts follow a January round of layoffs affecting about 1,000 people at the company’s Reality Labs unit, and another round in March targeting hundreds of employees in areas such as Facebook, global operations and sales.
Analysts expect Reality Labs, the virtual and augmented reality division, to post a first-quarter operating loss of $4.82 billion on $488.8 million in revenue.
Watch: Cboe’s JJ Kinahan says retail investors are expecting strong meta earnings.
