Meta Announces Robust Fourth-Quarter Earnings, Maintains Focus on AI Investments

Facebook owner Meta posted fourth-quarter earnings that surprised analysts. For the last three months of fiscal 2024, the tech giant brought in $48.4 billion in revenue, a 21% surge compared to Q4 2023. Prior to the report, Wall Street estimated earnings of only $47 billion.

As far as net income for the quarter, the company made $20.8 billion, soundly beating experts’ projections of $17.4 billion. For the year, revenue swelled to $164.5 billion, a 22% uptick versus 2023.

Facebook founder and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg credited innovative technology and products as well as an optimistic social media outlook for the remarkable numbers. The rapid adoption of AI assistant Meta AI — which reached 700 million monthly active users in Q4, according to CFO Susan Li — certainly helped generate interest and engagement on the company’s various platforms.

“We continue to make good progress on AI, glasses, and the future of social media,” said Zuckerberg in the company’s fourth-quarter report. “I’m excited to see these efforts scale further in 2025.”

Meta Investing in New AI and Gadgets

Meta is planning to put a lot of money toward AI growth. In a recent Facebook post, Zuckerberg said the company has earmarked $60 billion-$65 billion to advance its AI initiatives, including significant upgrades to its Llama 4 large language model. Alongside its Llama updates, the tech company is constructing a massive data center with a 2-gigawatt capacity to power its AI development.

Meta AI received some improvements earlier this month. The chatbot, which is available across various platforms like Instagram and WhatsApp, can now remember previous conversations with users. Essentially, this means the AI can personalize responses based on a user’s interests across all Meta apps regardless of the platform where a discussion started.

Last fall at Meta’s annual Connect conference, Zuckerberg announced new and updated AI-integrated gadgets. The company’s co-branded Ray-Ban smart glasses are getting an upgrade with improved AI responses and listening abilities. Augmented-reality glasses, dubbed Orion, capable of projecting holographic images in a user’s surrounding environment are the way.

Not just for Meta, but innovations in AI technology are crucial for American tech firms right now. Chinese startups, like DeepSeek, are making waves by releasing AI tools that meet or even exceed American technology. To win the race, U.S.-based AI developers will need to continue investing money and talent or run the risk of losing ground to competitive foreign upstarts.