Meta turned in a big beat for the fourth quarter of 2024, with the parent of Facebook and Instagram reporting record quarterly revenue and net profit to close out the year.
The strong results come as the company is looking ahead to a massive increase in AI-fueled capital spending in 2025 — and as Meta CEO and chairman Mark Zuckerberg has been working to win the favor of President Trump, an erstwhile antagonist of the tech giant.
The company reported Q4 revenue of $48.39 billion, up 21%, and net income of $20.84 billion, up 49%, or $8.02 per share. For Q4, Wall Street analysts on average expected Meta to post $46.99 billion in revenue and earnings per share of $6.76, according to LSEG Data & Analytics.
Meta did not provide revenue guidance for full year 2025, saying that “we expect the investments we are making in our core business this year will give us an opportunity to continue delivering strong revenue growth throughout 2025.” For Q1 2025, the company expects revenue to be $39.5 billion-$41.8 billion, which would up 8%-15% year-over-year.
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For December 2024, the average daily users across Meta’s apps — including Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp — hit 3.35 billion (up from 3.29 billion three months prior).
“We continue to make good progress on AI, glasses, and the future of social media,” Zuckerberg said in announcing Q4 earnings. “I’m excited to see these efforts scale further in 2025.”
Zuckerberg last week announced that Meta expects 2025 capex to be $60 billion-$65 billion, driven by AI data center investments, up significantly from $39.23 billion in 2024.
“This will be a defining year for AI,” Zuckerberg wrote in a Jan. 24 Facebook post. He said Meta is building a 2-gigawatt+ data center “that is so large it would cover a significant part of Manhattan,” with plans to bring 1GW of capacity online in ’25 and ending the year with more than 1.3 million GPUs. “This is a massive effort, and over the coming years it will drive our core products and business, unlock historic innovation, and extend American technology leadership,” he wrote. “Let’s go build!”
Meta and other U.S. tech companies were thrown for a loop this week after Chinese AI start-up DeepSeek released results that it said were produced far more cheaply than the AI systems used by American firms. Analysts at Jefferies estimated DeepSeek’s training costs were less than 10% that of Meta’s Llama large language model.
In recent weeks Zuckerberg has made moves to cozy up to Trump, who had previously attacked both Meta and Zuckerberg personally and once called Facebook “a true Enemy of the People!” This month, Meta appointed UFC CEO Dana White — a close Trump friend — to its board. In addition, the company donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund. Zuckerberg also recently announced his decision to end Meta’s fact-checking program (something Trump and other conservatives have complained about), saying, “It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression on Facebook and Instagram.”
Zuckerberg attended Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration in Washington, D.C., alongside other tech moguls like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. After Trump took office, Facebook and Instagram users discovered they were suddenly following Trump and others in his administration — which Meta said happened because of the White House transition. Users who had been following, for example, the @POTUS account on Facebook and Instagram under President Biden were now seeing Trump in their feed.
Meanwhile, last week, Meta said it would begin testing ads in Threads, its Twitter-like social platform, in the U.S. and Japan.