Meta misses on user growth, warns of 2025 jump in AI spending

Meta reported weaker-than-expected user numbers and warned of a significant acceleration in its infrastructure expenses in 2025 in its third-quarter earnings report on Wednesday.

The company's stock price was down slightly in after-hours trading.

Here's what the company reported compared with what Wall Street was expecting, based on a survey of analysts by LSEG:

Sales in the third quarter jumped 19% year over year while net income grew 35% to $15.7 billion from $11.6 billion a year earlier. That represents Meta's lowest year-over-year growth for net income since the second quarter of 2023.

The company reported 3.29 billion daily active people for the third quarter. That was up 5% year over year but came in below analysts' expectations of 3.31 billion.

Meta also raised capital expenditures guidance for the 2024 fiscal year to between $38 billion and $40 billion, up from $37 billion to $40 billion previously. Additionally, the company said it expects capital expenditures to continue to grow significantly in 2025 due to an acceleration in infrastructure expenses.

"Our AI investments continue to require serious infrastructure, and I expect to continue investing significantly there, too," Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Wednesday on a call with analysts.

Zuckerberg has been pointing to the company's massive investments in artificial intelligence, which includes spending billions of dollars on Nvidia's popular graphics processing units, as helping improve the company's core online ad business in the aftermath of Apple's 2021 iOS privacy update. The company has been improving upon and building more data centers to help provide the technology infrastructure needed for its AI strategy.

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