Meta has unveiled its new AI image generator, Muse Image, which was produced by Meta Superintelligence Labs, the company’s dedicated AI unit.
The new feature, which was internally code-named Mango, will be available for free through the Meta AI app, as well as in Instagram Stories and WhatsApp.
What exactly can you do with Muse? It sounds like the use-cases are similar to most other AI image generators — you’ll be able to create a whole lot of goofy and cartoonish images, for instance.
If you’re suffering from a dearth of imagination and can’t come up with any original prompts on your own, Meta says that Muse comes with “presets” — prefabricated image prompts — to “spark ideas.”
An accompanying video shows other potential uses. One is to use Muse to create custom ads (AI has notably crept into advertising over the past year) or to play around with interior decoration ideas (in the video, a user leverages Muse to see what a used couch might look like in their garage). This last function is designed to be integrated with Facebook Marketplace, Meta’s popular Craigslist-like locus of used furniture and accessories.
The model also features prompt-based image editing, which can be used to create images to share across Meta’s various apps and platforms.
“Ask it to mock up an image of you in front of a historical landmark, cleanly erase a photobomber from the background of a shot, or write a custom prompt to build a functional QR code,” the company offers.
At the same time, Meta is launching a host of new AI effects for Instagram Stories which are supported by Muse. Those effects include various customizable filters that can be used to modify existing photos.
Meta says that the use of the new AI model is free for “everyday creation” although, past a certain limit, users will need to use Meta’s subscription plans.
The company also said that Muse Video — presumably an AI video generator — is “already in development.” TechCrunch reached out to Meta for more information.
Meta has released a number of AI apps and services over the past year, including an assistant called Creator, and Pocket, an app that can be used to vibe code video games. The company has been accused of having a nebulous AI strategy, although it’s still on track to spend a whole lot on AI infrastructure this year as it continues to build out its services.
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Lucas is a senior writer at TechCrunch, where he covers artificial intelligence, consumer tech, and startups. He previously covered AI and cybersecurity at Gizmodo. You can contact Lucas by emailing [email protected].
In the latest trading session, Meta Platforms (META - Free Report) closed at $615.58, marking a +2.55% move from the previous day. The stock's performance was ahead of the S&P 500's daily loss of 0.45%. Elsewhere, the Dow lost 0.25%, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq lost 1.16%.
The stock of social media company has risen by 2.55% in the past month, leading the Computer and Technology sector's gain of 0.38% and the S&P 500's gain of 2.14%.
The upcoming earnings release of Meta Platforms will be of great interest to investors. The company's upcoming EPS is projected at $7.09, signifying a 0.70% drop compared to the same quarter of the previous year. Alongside, our most recent consensus estimate is anticipating revenue of $60.2 billion, indicating a 26.69% upward movement from the same quarter last year.
For the full year, the Zacks Consensus Estimates are projecting earnings of $33.11 per share and revenue of $253.41 billion, which would represent changes of +40.95% and +26.09%, respectively, from the prior year.
It is also important to note the recent changes to analyst estimates for Meta Platforms. These recent revisions tend to reflect the evolving nature of short-term business trends. As a result, upbeat changes in estimates indicate analysts' favorable outlook on the business health and profitability.
Our research suggests that these changes in estimates have a direct relationship with upcoming stock price performance. To take advantage of this, we've established the Zacks Rank, an exclusive model that considers these estimated changes and delivers an operational rating system.
The Zacks Rank system, ranging from #1 (Strong Buy) to #5 (Strong Sell), possesses a remarkable history of outdoing, externally audited, with #1 stocks returning an average annual gain of +25% since 1988. Over the past month, there's been a 0.36% rise in the Zacks Consensus EPS estimate. Meta Platforms currently has a Zacks Rank of #3 (Hold).
In terms of valuation, Meta Platforms is currently trading at a Forward P/E ratio of 18.13. For comparison, its industry has an average Forward P/E of 19.77, which means Meta Platforms is trading at a discount to the group.
We can also see that META currently has a PEG ratio of 0.94. Comparable to the widely accepted P/E ratio, the PEG ratio also accounts for the company's projected earnings growth. The Internet - Software industry had an average PEG ratio of 1.09 as trading concluded yesterday.
The Internet - Software industry is part of the Computer and Technology sector. With its current Zacks Industry Rank of 95, this industry ranks in the top 39% of all industries, numbering over 250.
The strength of our individual industry groups is measured by the Zacks Industry Rank, which is calculated based on the average Zacks Rank of the individual stocks within these groups. Our research shows that the top 50% rated industries outperform the bottom half by a factor of 2 to 1.
Don't forget to use Zacks.com to keep track of all these stock-moving metrics, and others, in the upcoming trading sessions.
Meta has begun rolling out an image generation model available in Meta AI.
Muse Image is the first such model developed by Meta Superintelligence Labs, the company said in a Tuesday (July 7) press release.
The model understands complex prompts and blends multiple photos into creations that can be downloaded and shared to the user’s chat, story or feed.
It also features suggested prompts designed to spark ideas, the ability to “@ mention” to add photos to creations, and the ability to sketch changes or edits directly on images.
“Muse Image also powers creative experiences on Instagram and WhatsApp, and is coming soon to Facebook, Messenger and for advertisers through Meta Advantage+ creative,” Meta said in the release.
In another Tuesday press release meant for businesses, Meta said Muse Image will start helping power image generation in Meta Advantage+ creative within weeks and will bring smarter reasoning and iterative refinement to Meta’s existing generative AI ad creation tool.
“Early results with Muse Image-powered generation variants show strong promise—advertisers who tested the experience cited higher-quality creative, with photorealism and product integrity standing out,” the company said in the release.
In a Tuesday blog post introducing Muse Image, Meta said the tool can follow instructions faithfully, edit with precision, compose from multiple references, draw on Instagram for social context, provide agentic tool use and integrate with Meta’s Muse Spark.
Meta announced Muse Spark in April, saying that it is the first in a series of new AI models, that it powers the Meta AI app and website, and that it would soon roll out to the company’s social media platforms and AI glasses.
Later in April, during the company’s earnings call, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that it had seen a surge in business users employing its AI tools and that the number of conversations these tools were handling had leapt from 1 million a week at the start of the year to 10 million a week by late March.
It was reported in June that after spending $14 billion to bring Alexandr Wang and his Scale AI team into the fold in 2025, Meta is facing pressure to prove it can monetize the resulting AI tools such as Muse Spark.
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Muse Image, which can create realistic images for users on Instagram and WhatsApp, is the company's latest attempt to catch up in the global artificial intelligence race.
On July 6, 2026, Meta disclosed in a court filing that four states (California, Colorado, Kentucky, and New Jersey) are seeking approximately $1.4 trillion in penalties ahead of an August 2026 trial in Oakland, California. The number is close to Meta‘s (NASDAQ:META | META Price Prediction) entire market value of approximately $1.55 trillion. The stock closed up 1.75% the following session, trading near $610.80.
What the $1.4 Trillion Actually Is The figure is a proposed penalty calculation, not a verdict. The states calculated it by multiplying per-violation fines under state law against the number of young users they claim were harmed. The states’ own filings on penalty methodology are sealed; Meta disclosed the $1.4 trillion number in its own rebuttal filing, calling the demand “unsupported by the evidence” and stating “a sanction of that size has no analog in the history of consumer protection enforcement.” US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers rejected Meta’s attempt to dismiss the case.
The New Mexico Chapter On March 25, 2026, a Santa Fe jury ordered Meta to pay $375 million in civil penalties for 75,000 violations of New Mexico’s Unfair Practices Act. The case originated from a 2023 undercover investigation where state agents posing as a 13-year-old were quickly targeted by predators on Meta’s platforms. The stock hit its 52-week low of $520.26 the day after the verdict, then recovered. The market treated it as isolated.
The Pullout Threat Meta warned reforms could “force Meta to withdraw its apps entirely” from New Mexico. Attorney General Raul Torrez called it a “PR stunt”: “This is not about technological capability. Meta simply refuses to place the safety of children above its profits.” Demanded reforms include bans on infinite scroll, autoplay, and push notifications during school and sleep hours, mechanics that directly drive ad engagement.
The Avalanche Meta is defending more than 2,400 consolidated federal lawsuits, a 42-state attorney general coalition case, and 14 additional state lawsuits going to trial in February 2027. A Los Angeles jury found Meta and Google negligent on March 25, 2026 ($6 million verdict). Meta’s SEC filings warn damages “could amount to hundreds of billions of dollars.” Insurance carriers are reportedly refusing to defend certain claims. Plaintiffs’ attorney Mark Lanier has publicly compared the litigation to tobacco, which ultimately produced a $246 billion national settlement.
The Bull Case Courts rarely award maximum statutory penalties. Meta generated approximately $160 billion in revenue in 2025 and posted Q1 2026 revenue of $56.31 billion, up 33.1% year over year, with EPS of $10.44 versus $6.66 consensus (although one-time benefits increased quarterly EPS). Analyst sentiment remains bullish: median 12-month price target approximately $840, Cantor Fitzgerald Overweight at $920. The current P/E ratio of 22 does not price existential risk. Polymarket traders assign 97.3% probability META stays above $530 by Friday.
The Open Question Shares are down approximately 8.9% year to date, underperforming but far from collapsing. The market has bought every dip: after New Mexico, after the LA verdict, after the $1.4 trillion filing. Analyst target price sits at $828.17. Yet the August Oakland trial, the July 27 California bellwether, the February 2027 state cases and the imminent New Mexico public nuisance ruling arrive within roughly seven months. At what point does accumulated legal exposure change the reflex to buy the dip? Meta shareholders may want to answer that before the calendar does.
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If four of the states suing Meta for allegedly fueling a teen mental health crisis prevail in their case, the company will be on the hook for a whopping $1.4 trillion in penalties, Meta says — a figure the tech giant blasted as “outlandish.”
The Mark Zuckerberg-led company arrived at the gigantic sum — which is nearly as large as the company’s entire market cap — based on how the attorneys general of California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey have argued penalties should be calculated if they win the case.
The two sides are scheduled to face off in Oakland federal court on Aug. 18.
Meta and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg have strenuously denied wrongdoing. CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images “A sanction of that size has no analog in the history of consumer protection enforcement,” Meta’s attorneys wrote in the late Monday filing, adding that the states’ proposals were “unsubstantiated” and “outlandish.”
A total of 29 states are attached to the lawsuit against Meta, which accuses the company of major violations of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. The legislation bars the collection of data from underage users without parental consent.
They further allege that Facebook and Instagram were designed to be addictive to kids, causing a wave of issues ranging from anxiety and depression to self-harm and even suicide.
California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey are also targeting Meta for allegedly misleading the public about safety risks.
Meta, which has strenuously denied wrongdoing, said the four states’ proposed remedies go far beyond the scope of the case. They also accuse Meta of improperly double- or even triple-counting teen users who allegedly experienced harm based on how long they use Facebook and Instagram each day.
“These remedies have no basis in the record in this case, are entirely unmoored from the claimed deceptive statements or unfair practices, are based on features this Court has held are immune from liability under Section 230, and violate the legal and due process limits on the scope of [Unfair Practices Act] penalties,” the company’s lawyers wrote, referring to the section of the Communications Act of 1934 that broadly protects online platforms from being held liable for content posted by their users.
While the states’ specific proposals remain under seal, plaintiff attorneys said at a court hearing last month that they were guided by local laws and the estimated number of underage users in each state who were affected.
“Our lawsuit alleges Meta has prioritized profits over the safety of kids and fueled the mental health crisis we see impacting a generation of American children,” a spokesperson for the California attorney general’s office said in a statement. “The California Department of Justice looks forward to holding Meta fully accountable at trial in August.”
The $1.4 trillion in penalties is nearly equal to Meta’s entire market cap. Bloomberg via Getty Images Representatives for the attorneys general of Colorado and New Jersey declined comment. Kentucky’s AG did not immediately respond.
Meta shares were up 3% in trading Tuesday.
US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, who is overseeing the case, shot down an attempt by Meta to get it thrown out on June 30, stating in part that there were still material factual disputes as to whether the company’s apps were designed to be addictive.
Meta faces more than 2,400 pending lawsuits brought by school districts, parents and governments in what critics have described as a “Big Tobacco moment” for social media.
The company suffered major legal setbacks earlier this year in back-to-back court losses – one in California state court that found Meta liable for fueling social media addiction for a woman identified as KGM, and another in New Mexico, where a jury found that Meta failed to protect kids from online sex creeps and misled the public about safety risks on its apps.
More than two dozen state AGs are suing Meta for fueling a teen mental health crisis. AP Still, the $1.4 trillion penalty is likely far higher than what Meta will ultimately face in the case brought by state AGs.
In the KGM case, Meta and fellow defendant Google were ordered to pay a total of $6 million in damages, with Meta on the hook for 70% of that sum.
In New Mexico, Meta was ordered to pay $375 million in penalties. Company spokesman Andy Stone touted the verdict as “just a fraction of what the state sought.”
The move turns Meta’s flagship assistant from a largely text‑based helper into a full‑fledged creative studio, and that shift matters for both engagement on Meta’s platforms and the long‑term argument for Meta’s stock.
META stock is moving. See the chart and price action here. Meta’s AI CapEx Delivers New FeaturesMeta has poured billions into AI infrastructure and models, from Llama to Muse Spark, while investors have struggled to see where that spending connects to everyday product use.
A consumer‑ready image generator changes that. Muse Image makes visual creation a native feature of Meta.ai, letting people generate illustrations, social graphics, and concept art directly in the same environment where they chat, search and plan.
The result is an assistant that is more useful and stickier, increasing the odds that Meta’s AI investments show up in actual user behavior rather than just research blog posts and developer demos.
Increased User EngagementVisual creation inside Meta.ai can lift engagement on Meta’s platforms in three connected ways. It keeps sessions inside Meta instead of third‑party apps, extends time spent and increases chances to surface content, recommendations, and ads.
Muse Image also improves how posts look. When average output moves closer to creator‑grade work, feeds become richer, and interaction metrics that matter for Meta Stock can rise.
Financial impact comes through ad inventory. If Muse becomes part of how small businesses, creators, and advertisers produce visuals, the volume and quality of ad‑ready assets inside Meta’s ecosystem increase, enabling more personalized, visually varied campaigns with better performance and pricing.
A native image generator also signals that Meta is committed to an AI‑powered creative platform, reinforcing the idea that heavy AI capex is building more profitable ad products rather than just experimental tools.
The Bottom LineMuse Image is not a guaranteed accelerator for Meta; competition in AI imagery is fierce and regulatory risks remain.
It does, however, give analysts and investors tangible signals to watch — uptake of visual creation in Meta.ai, creator adoption, and whether gains in engagement and ad quality show up in results —putting fresh fuel under Meta’s stock at a time when markets are demanding proof that Meta’s AI era has durable commercial legs.
META Stock Price Activity: Meta Platforms shares were up 2.55% during regular trading and down 0.23% in after-hours trading on Tuesday, last trading at $614.17, according to Benzinga Pro data.
Photo: Shutterstock
This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors.
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Starting the week on a bullish note, Meta Platforms (META +2.59%) stock closed 3% higher yesterday, up from its finish the previous market session. Shares of the social media stock continued their ascent today after the company provided insight into its new image-generation model.
Shares of Meta closed 2.6% higher today, after retreating from an earlier 4.2% gain.
Image source: Getty Images.
Drawing a picture of its new image-generation tool Meta announced today that its first image-generation model from Meta Superintelligence Labs is now available in Meta AI.
Today's Change
(
2.59
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15.56
Current Price
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615.85
Dubbed Muse Image, the model is available across various Meta platforms, including Instagram and WhatsApp. According to the company, Muse Images uses "advanced reasoning to understand complex prompts, seamlessly blending multiple photos into high-quality creations you can download and share anywhere -- including directly to your chat, story, or feed."
Muse Image will soon be available on Facebook, Messenger, and to advertisers through Meta Advantage+ creative.
Is Meta stock a buy on today's news? Today's announcement of Muse Image is noteworthy, but it's hardly sufficient, in and of itself, to justify buying Meta stock. Now, however, seems like a great time for another reason. Trading at 11.6 times operating cash flow, a discount to its five-year average cash flow multiple of 13.7, Meta stock is currently sitting in the bargain bin. For investors seeking a summer buying opportunity, Meta stock is worth a close look.
Scott Levine has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Meta Platforms. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
City officials in Cheyenne, Wyoming, said a Meta data center under construction caused the contamination of the city's wastewater treatment facility. Cheyenne Board of Public Utilities Officials in the city of Cheyenne, Wyoming, say a massive, under-construction Meta data center campus located just south of the city is responsible for contaminating part of its recycled water system.
Cheyenne's Board of Public Utilities said in recent public notices that water discharged by Goat Systems, a Meta contractor at the site, contaminated the city's wastewater treatment facility with a rare bacterium.
That facility includes Cheyenne's reuse water system, which is used for irrigation purposes only, a board spokesperson said. The system cleans used water so it can be safely released back into the environment or reused for watering things like parks and golf courses. The bacterium did not enter the city's drinking supply, city officials said.
"We were able to connect the Meta Data Center campus to this through sampling their site and it was determined to be through their fill-and-flush discharge that the bacteria was introduced to the system," Erin Lamb, a spokesperson for the Board of Public Utilities, told Business Insider on Tuesday.
Fill-and-flush operations are a cooling system for data centers in which water is periodically flushed from pipes, discarded, and then replenished with new water. Some data centers now use a "closed-loop" system that recycles the same water within the facility.
The board's public notice characterized the infraction as "significant noncompliance" and revoked Goat Systems' "industrial discharge privileges for fill and flush operations." While the board posted the notice on July 2, it said the operations were halted on March 24.
Goat Systems, the Meta contractor, "immediately ceased discharge of wastewater from the fill and flush operation" after it was notified of the pollutant, Cheyenne's Board of Public Utilities said. A representative for Goat Systems could not be reached for comment by Business Insider.
A Meta spokesperson told Business Insider the company is working with its general contractor, Fortis, to resolve the issue.
"When the board shared that it found a substance in the city's wastewater — not public drinking water — Fortis immediately stopped discharging industrial wastewater and began hauling it offsite," the spokesperson said. "Fortis also began its own water testing with an independent environmental specialist, which has found no trace of the substance."
A spokesperson for Fortis said the company "takes its environmental obligations seriously and will continue to work constructively with BOPU and all relevant authorities as this matter is fully resolved."
The Cheyenne Board of Public Utilities said in its notice that it would pause accepting any industrial water discharge from any data center, whether it's a fill-and-flush or closed-loop system.
The board said the bacterium it found in the wastewater was Cupriavidus gilardii. Although infections are rare, direct exposure can pose a risk to older people or those who are immunocompromised. Laboratory staff identified the bacterium during a wastewater sampling in February, the board said.
"Over the past two months, BOPU staff have undertaken significant remediation efforts, including draining and disinfecting the entire reuse water system and Prairie View Pond to eliminate any remaining bacterial presence," the board said in its notice. "To prevent potential migration throughout the reuse distribution network, all affected irrigation systems were temporarily converted to potable water supplies."
Lamb, the spokesperson for BOPU, told Business Insider that the agency plans to hold a press conference on the matter in the next week or so.
Meta announced the $800 million, 715,000-square-foot data center development in 2024. Once the campus is fully operational, Meta says it will be wholly sustainable. The company said it aims to be water-positive by 2030, meaning it will restore more water than it consumes.
"The Cheyenne Data Center will be optimized for our AI workloads and help people connect, build communities, and grow their businesses," Meta said at the time of its announcement.
Data centers have become a divisive topic. Tech companies are spending billions of dollars to develop the facilities that power their AI products. They say data centers can generate economic growth, create jobs, and push the US ahead in the AI race against China.
Critics, however, are much less enthused. Many Americans are pushing back against data centers and don't want them anywhere near their communities. They're concerned that the sprawling facilities will negatively impact water resources, worsen air quality, increase noise levels, and interfere with their quality of life. Some protesters have swarmed local planning meetings, created petitions, and taken legal action to stop construction.
In response, a handful of legislators have taken steps to place parameters around data center developments or ban them altogether. At the federal level, Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York proposed a moratorium on AI data centers.
The data center industry is still speeding full steam ahead, however. By the end of 2025, there were over 1,400 data centers built or approved for construction in 45 states and Washington, DC.
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Lauren Edmonds is an award-winning reporter on the Business News team. When news isn't breaking, she covers personal finance, kitchen-table economics, and paths to financial freedom, including investing, real estate, side hustles, and small business. She also writes about guaranteed and universal basic income programs in the United States.Lauren has also covered lifestyle and entertainment, digital culture, and more. She has a master's degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and resides in New York City.Do you have an interesting story to tell? You can reach Lauren at [email protected] or on Signal at ledmonds0.07.Popular StoriesNetflix wants to be Disney when it grows up Why Hollywood is paying this 17-year-old up to $20,000 to boost film trailers with TikTok editsHere's all the free money Trump's talked about giving Americans during his second term — and where it all standsA 17-year-old earned $72,000 after investing his e-commerce profits into stocks. Here's why he bet on the tech industry.Lawmakers float a nationwide basic income experiment that would cover the cost of a 2-bedroom apartmentNearly 30,000 Americans have received about $335 million in basic income. Here are 5 takeaways. Americans ditch suffocating healthcare costs and divisive politics to retire in Italy: 'It's the way they approach life'From 'road-schooling' to gas that costs $500, this family of 4 shares what it's like living in a solar-powered Greyhound bus
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Natalie is a senior reporter on Business Insider's Business News team.She was previously on BI's Legal Affairs team where she covered major cases out of state and federal court, as well as bankruptcy. Her coverage often focused on stories at the intersection of law, business, politics and technology. Natalie has covered Donald Trump’s criminal and civil cases, the wave of lawsuits against the second Trump administration, the indictment and criminal trial of Sean “Diddy” Combs, the shooting death of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, and the legal battles facing Elon Musk and his companies. Natalie came to Business Insider in June 2021 as a breaking news reporter, focusing on the most interesting angles around the trending news of the day. Natalie largely drove BI’s coverage around the fatal “Rust” shooting involving Alec Baldwin and the disappearance and murder of Gabby Petito.Prior to joining BI, Natalie worked for the New York Post, the New York Daily News, and The Brooklyn Paper. She has an extensive background covering crime and courts. During her more than 12-year journalism career, she did a stint covering the police beat out of the headquarters for the New York Police Department. Natalie, a Brooklyn native, graduated from Brooklyn College in 2012 with a journalism degree. Popular articles
Walmart and Amazon face legal trouble for using a points system to track and fire employees over absences: lawyersCelebrities who partied with Diddy may want to contact their lawyersAn unchecked AI could usher in a new dark ageAt Diddy's A-list 'white parties,' naked women were a staple — but that didn't seem to raise eyebrows at the timeThe illegal maneuvers the rich use to get richerOwner of ship that crashed into Baltimore bridge will likely try to invoke 1851 law used to cap damages after Titanic disaster Meta Data Centers
Meta is launching a cloud compute business, signaling excess internal capacity and a shift in its capex trajectory. META's move is negative for 'pick-and-shovel' AI suppliers like Nvidia, SK hynix, and infrastructure firms, as Meta's capex growth may slow or cap out. Cloud contract providers such as CoreWeave and Nebius face material risk, given Meta's likely preference for internal datacenters over external deals.
The question for anyone parking retirement dollars in the AI infrastructure trade is simple: Should you own Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META | META Price Prediction) or Nebius Group (NASDAQ:NBIS) right now? Both now feed the same neocloud thesis after Meta said it would potentially monetize its own compute capacity, but they sit at opposite ends of the risk spectrum. One is a cash-gushing mega-cap; the other is a hyper-growth infrastructure builder still bleeding operating cash. Here is the head-to-head on the three dimensions that matter for a retirement portfolio.
Valuation: Meta Wins Decisively Meta trades at a trailing P/E of 22 and a forward P/E of roughly 19, backed by $43.59 billion in full-year 2025 free cash flow and a 33.08% YoY revenue jump in Q1 2026 to $56.31 billion. That is a reasonable price for a company compounding at that pace.
Nebius carries a forward P/E of 68 and a price-to-sales ratio of 62, and its GAAP profits are essentially an accounting artifact: Q1 2026 EPS of $2.11 was driven by a $780.60 million non-cash ClickHouse revaluation gain, while the adjusted net loss actually widened 20% year over year to $100.30 million. Morningstar pegs fair value at $120, well below the current $200.43. Advantage Meta.
Volatility and Balance Sheet: Meta Wins Again Meta is a $1.52 trillion franchise with $115.80 billion in 2025 operating cash flow, interest coverage of 71x, and roughly 3.56 billion daily active people across its Family of Apps. Its beta is 1.246, and the stock is down 8.9% year to date, hardly a trauma event.
Nebius, at a $54.7 billion market cap, is carrying $10.04 billion in convertible debt principal and $9.9 billion in future data center lease obligations. The share price traveled from $88.62 in February 2026 to $197.78 by May, then dropped 18.43% in the past week alone on news that Meta is building its own cloud. A 52-week range of $43.89 to $299.86 speaks for itself. Retirees do not need that.
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Growth Trajectory: Nebius Wins the Raw Numbers This one goes to Nebius, and it is not close on a percentage basis. AI Cloud revenue rose 841% year over year in Q1 2026, with adjusted EBITDA margins at 45%. Guidance calls for $7 to $9 billion in ARR exiting 2026 against a $1.25 billion year-end 2025 run rate, backed by $27 billion committed from Meta and $17 billion from Microsoft. Remaining performance obligations sit at $33.59 billion.
Meta’s 33% top-line growth off a $200 billion base is remarkable, but it will not 7x in a year. That said, Meta has its own neocloud optionality. Morgan Stanley estimates that if Meta leases out just 250 MW of contracted capacity to third parties at $40 per watt, it generates roughly $3 in EPS upside in 2028, about an 8% boost. Scale that to 1,000 MW and it is nearly $12 in additional EPS. Meta’s $125 to $145 billion 2026 capex guide is building a business line that does not yet exist. Nebius still wins the growth column, but Meta could quickly close the strategic gap.
The Verdict For a retirement-focused investor, Meta screens as the more defensible position, and it is not a close call. You get real earnings, a 0.36% dividend, roughly $26.25 billion of 2025 buybacks, a fortress balance sheet, and free optionality on a leased-out neocloud business Wall Street has yet to price in. Prediction markets assign a 69% probability Meta out-values OpenAI by year-end 2026, a useful proxy for institutional conviction.
Nebius belongs in a different bucket entirely: aggressive, long-horizon growth accounts that can tolerate 50% drawdowns without flinching. The Meta cloud announcement validates the infrastructure thesis rather than killing it, but customer concentration, dilution risk, and GAAP losses make it inappropriate for anyone drawing down capital within a decade. Meta fits retirement-style portfolios. Nebius fits speculative, high-risk allocations.
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Recent reporting says Meta Platforms (META +1.24%) is exploring ways to rent out excess AI compute. That gives investors an easy worry: maybe Meta bought too much infrastructure, and the AI capital expenditure (capex) cycle is moving from shortage to surplus faster than expected.
The gains came amid improving analyst sentiment and growing investor optimism over Meta’s long-term artificial intelligence monetization strategy.
Erste Group upgraded the stock to Buy from Hold, while BNP Paribas reiterated its Outperform rating ahead of second-quarter earnings.
BNP Paribas said Meta remains well-positioned to sustain revenue growth despite rising AI infrastructure spending and sees a potential future cloud offering as an additional long-term growth opportunity.
Analyst Outlook Ahead Of EarningsBNP Paribas reiterated its Outperform rating and $955 price forecast on Meta ahead of the company’s expected earnings release in the last week of July.
Senior analyst Nick Jones said investors are likely to focus on Meta’s capital spending plans, AI product development, a potential cloud offering and subscription adoption trends.
The analyst expects second-quarter revenue growth to slow from prior quarters because of temporary factors but believes the company can maintain long-term top-line momentum.
Revenue And Earnings ExpectationsBNP Paribas said Meta’s valuation suggests investors remain cautious about earnings growth, the scale of AI investments, returns on those investments, competition in artificial intelligence and the broader macroeconomic environment.
Jones said investors are expecting second-quarter revenue growth of 27% to 29% year over year, compared with the consensus estimate of 27%. He also expects GAAP diluted earnings per share above $7.40, versus the Street consensus of $7.19.
For the third quarter, BNP Paribas believes investors are looking for revenue guidance of $62 billion to $64 billion, compared with the consensus estimate of $63.2 billion.
AI Spending Remains In FocusThe analyst also expects Meta to raise its 2026 capital expenditure outlook by at least $10 billion from its current $125 billion to $145 billion range as higher component costs continue to inflate AI infrastructure spending.
Despite slowing user growth as Meta’s platforms approach saturation, BNP Paribas said engagement remains a key strength. The firm estimates Meta accounts for more than 40% of time spent across major social media platforms, nearly double that of its next-largest competitor. That, it said, should support continued growth in revenue per daily active person.
BNP Paribas expects Meta to fund its elevated AI investments through stronger monetization of AI features, advertising market share gains, subscription revenue and the optionality of a future cloud offering.
Meta Platforms Technical AnalysisMeta is trading about 5.4% above its 20-day simple moving average and slightly above its 50-day moving average. However, the stock remains below both its 100-day and 200-day moving averages, suggesting the longer-term trend has yet to turn positive.
Momentum indicators have improved. The moving average convergence divergence (MACD) remains above its signal line, indicating selling pressure has eased.
Even so, the broader trend remains cautious. The 20-day moving average is still below the 50-day average, while the 50-day average remains below the 200-day average following a death cross that formed in December 2025.
Technical analysts are watching resistance near $643, close to the 200-day moving average. Initial support sits around $595 near the 50-day moving average.
Earnings Remain The Next Major CatalystAttention is now shifting to Meta’s expected second-quarter earnings report, estimated for July 29, 2026, which could shape the stock’s next move.
Wall Street expects earnings per share of $7.18, up from $7.14 a year earlier. Revenue is projected to increase to $60.22 billion from $47.52 billion.
The stock trades at roughly 21.8 times earnings and carries a consensus Buy rating. The average analyst price forecast stands at $826.88. Recent analyst actions include:
Erste Group upgraded the stock to Buy on Tuesday. Wells Fargo maintained an Overweight rating and raised its price forecast to $767 on July 2. RBC Capital Markets reiterated its Outperform rating with an $810 price forecast on June 1. Meta Platforms Price ActionMETA Stock Price Activity: Meta Platforms shares were up 1.42% at $608.83 at the time of publication on Tuesday, according to Benzinga Pro data.
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Meta on Tuesday released Muse Image, a new artificial intelligence model for creating images as the company seeks to attract creators and advertisers to its offerings.
Originally codenamed Mango, the AI technology marks the second major release from Meta Superintelligence Labs led by Alexandr Wang, who oversaw the April unveiling of the Muse Spark large language model that succeeded the company's previous Llama family of models.
Muse Image will be available for consumers to access for free via the Meta AI app and site, WhatsApp direct messages and Instagram Stories. Power users and creators must sign up for one of Meta's new monthly subscription plans that debuted in May to create many AI-generated images and access certain features. If users hit their free limit, they can purchase a Meta One subscription or wait until their limit resets, the company said.
Muse Image will also power advertiser-specific, image-generation tools as part of Meta's AI-powered Advantage Plus service that lets brands more easily develop ad creative for their marketing campaigns and automate certain tasks. Meta said it's been working with businesses and advertisers as part of debuting Muse Image.
"Muse Image brings native reasoning to the creative process to adjust elements, swap styles, and create variations based on the advertiser's creative, resulting in high-quality, on-brand ad variations with fewer iterations," the company said in a blog post for businesses. "In the coming weeks, advertisers and agencies can expect to see image variants powered by Muse Image."
Read more CNBC tech newsChinese lidar maker with Nvidia ties accused of being cyber risk for U.S.China's Alibaba bans Anthropic AI for employees after 'distillation attack' accusationSpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell to donate stock to Trump AccountsMicrosoft cuts 4,800 jobs, as Xbox unit downsizes and plans to spin off four gaming studiosThe new image-generation model and efforts to monetize it show how Meta is trying to expand from its core business of online advertising and generate new revenue sources tied to its hefty spending on AI-related infrastructure.
OpenAI and Alphabet got a head start over Meta in offering similar image-generation models, with Google's Nano Banana becoming a hit with consumers when it was released last fall.
Meta also revealed internal benchmark tests showing Muse Image trailing OpenAI's latest GPT Image 2 model but beating the Nano Banana 2 model in tasks like editing both single and multiple images.
The social media giant has previously used third-party AI models like Midjourney and Black Forest Labs to power various image and video generation features within its Meta AI app and site. The company said it plans to use its new AI model to reduce reliance on similar third-party technologies.
Meta also plans to release an AI video generation model dubbed Muse Video at a later date, adding in a technical blog that it "offers competitive performance in prompt adherence, visual fidelity, and temporal consistency."
Muse Image will be available on Facebook and Messenger as well as more areas within the Instagram and WhatsApp services later in the year.
Meta Platforms said on Tuesday it is rolling out Muse Image, its first image-generation model from Meta Superintelligence Labs, as the Facebook owner expands generative AI tools across its apps.
Meta Platforms (NASDAQ: META) has received a fresh bullish endorsement on Wall Street after Truist Securities reaffirmed its ‘Buy’ rating and maintained an $840 stock price target.
The target implies upside of about 37% from Meta’s press-time price of $612.
META one-week stock price chart. Source: Finbold The updated outlook comes as the firm argued that Meta remains deeply undervalued, citing the company’s massive global user base and growing ability to monetize artificial intelligence across its ecosystem.
Truist analyst Youssef Squali’s thesis centers on Meta’s unique distribution advantage, which includes more than 3.5 billion daily users, over 200 million small and medium-sized businesses, and more than 10 million advertisers across its platforms.
According to the research note, Meta’s AI strategy is increasingly focused on monetization rather than solely competing in the race for model quality.
Truist highlighted the company’s ability to integrate its AI products across major platforms such as Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger, creating what it sees as a competitive advantage that rivals may struggle to replicate.
The firm also pointed to early signs of success from the rollout of its AI initiatives and identified further execution on small-business tools as a potential catalyst for the stock.
Meanwhile, Truist’s outlook aligns with the broader Wall Street consensus on Meta.
According to data from TipRanks, Meta carries a ‘Strong Buy’ consensus rating based on 38 analyst reviews, including 33 ‘Buy’ ratings, five ‘Hold’ ratings, and no ‘Sell’ recommendations.
The average 12-month Meta stock forecast stands at $818.23, representing potential upside of about 33.6%. Analysts’ targets range from a low of $622.25 to a high of $1,015.
META 12-month stock price prediction. Source: TipRanks The bullish outlook comes as Meta shares recently climbed above $600, with investors balancing strong advertising growth against the company’s heavy AI spending.
The tech giant reported first-quarter revenue of $56.3 billion, up 33% year-over-year. Despite the strong performance, Meta stock remains down roughly 9% to 12% in 2026 as concerns persist over its aggressive investment in AI infrastructure.
Meta recently raised its 2026 capital expenditure guidance to between $125 billion and $145 billion to support new data centers and AI initiatives, including Meta Superintelligence Labs.
While the increased spending has weighed on near-term sentiment, management still expects operating income growth this year and guided for second-quarter revenue of $58 billion to $61 billion.
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Many investors have grown concerned that tech companies, particularly hyperscalers, are spending too aggressively on artificial intelligence (AI). It's a touchy subject because if it turns out to be true, it could send share prices crashing. There's been a growing pushback on AI data centers from the public, and there is concern that many companies are using AI excessively (also known as "tokenmaxxing") without any real payoff.
Meta Platforms (META +1.01%) CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently made an announcement that, while it sounds like it should unlock some growth opportunities for the business, may end up revealing a risk: that it's been spending too aggressively on AI.
Image source: Getty Images.
Meta plans to sell excess computing power One of Meta's newest business ventures now involves selling excess AI capacity, not unlike what some other tech companies are already doing. What's puzzling about this, however, is that Meta has been spending aggressively on AI and has made its Meta AI assistant available in its social media applications, unveiled Muse Spark (its new foundation model), and last year it also launched Superintelligence Labs.
The idea that Meta thinks it might not need some of its AI capabilities amid such vast efforts is a bit surprising, but perhaps reflective of its excessive spending. This is, after all, the same company that has spent tens of billions of dollars on the metaverse and even underwent a name change years ago to reflect its change in strategy.
In May, at the company's annual shareholder meeting, Zuckerberg said that if it has overbuilt, it can sell compute to other companies at a premium. While the initial suggestion may have seemed innocent and nondefinitive, plans to build a new cloud business suggest it's much more than that, and may indicate the company has recognized it has invested too heavily in AI.
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Is this a red flag for Meta investors? Meta and other tech companies spent aggressively amid the pandemic, overestimating demand and anticipating a new normal that didn't pan out. Meta took it even further and spent aggressively on the metaverse, and that remains a costly venture for it today, with its Reality Labs division still incurring billions in losses each quarter.
This is a company that simply doesn't inspire much confidence that it's being methodical or thoughtful about its expenditures, and that raises the risk that, in the future, it may again make drastic cost-cutting efforts to correct for its excessive spending and investments. New plans for a cloud business to sell excess AI compute power may very well end up proving to be an early sign of that, which is why I'd tread carefully with Meta's stock. Although it's down 9% this year, there could be far further for the stock to fall if investors begin to worry that it's overspent on AI.
Meta Platforms (NASDAQ: META | META Price Prediction) and CoreWeave (NASDAQ: CRWV) just closed the books on their Q1 2026 reports with sharply divergent financial profiles. Meta printed $56.31 billion in revenue while raising capex guidance to $125 to $145 billion. CoreWeave grew sales 111.7% to $2.078 billion but posted a $740 million net loss.
One Prints Cash. The Other Prints Debt. Meta is a self-funding machine. Advertising revenue climbed 33% to $55.02 billion, ad impressions rose 19%, and pricing per ad jumped 12%. That funded $19 billion in Q1 capex without touching the balance sheet. Mark Zuckerberg framed the buildout around “personal superintelligence” and the debut model from Meta Superintelligence Labs.
CoreWeave’s story is different. CEO Michael Intrator called it “the strongest bookings quarter in CoreWeave’s history,” with backlog approaching $99.4 billion and active power crossing 1 GW. Yet capex hit $7.695 billion, roughly 370% of quarterly revenue, and interest expense doubled to $536 million. Total liabilities now sit at $50.81 billion against $55.57 billion in assets.
Q1 2026 Driver Meta CoreWeave Operating Margin ~41% -6.9% Free Cash Flow $12.39B -$4.71B Funding Source Internal FCF Debt and equity issuance The $21 Billion Handshake Hides a Structural Problem Meta signed a $21 billion multi-year compute partnership with CoreWeave through 2032, which explains why CoreWeave’s backlog looks so fat. The catch is what Bloomberg reported about “Meta Compute,” an initiative to turn Meta’s in-house AI infrastructure into a public cloud that rents out excess bare-metal GPU capacity. Meta’s largest customer relationship with CoreWeave could morph into direct competition inside the same contract window.
That matters because CoreWeave’s pricing power rests on GPU scarcity. If Meta redirects even a slice of its $145 billion capital expenditure cycle into rentable capacity, the neocloud scarcity premium erodes. Insider selling ahead of the earnings report and the securities class action alleging concealed data center delays aren’t helping.
What I’m Watching Into Q2 Meta reports Q2 on July 29, and I want to see whether ad pricing holds while capex accelerates. For CoreWeave, the question is margin trajectory. Operating margin has flipped from +3.8% in Q3 2025 to -6.9% in Q1 2026 even as revenue exploded. That’s the wrong direction.
Why I’d Rather Own Meta Here For me, Meta is the cleaner bet. It trades at a P/E near 21 with 57 buy ratings and a consensus target of $828.17 against a $600.29 quote. CoreWeave analysts still see upside to $142.29, but the setup only works if AI GPU pricing stays tight. If you believe Meta Compute lands as advertised, that assumption cracks. On the data, Meta’s self-funded balance sheet looks better positioned than CoreWeave’s debt-financed buildout if GPU pricing softens.
At an internal Meta town hall on July 2, 2026, CEO Mark Zuckerberg told employees that AI agent development over the prior four months “hasn’t really accelerated in the way that we expected,” per a recording heard by Reuters. He added that the company’s reorganization was not as “clean” as planned and that its bets on the new structure “haven’t come to fruition yet,” though he expects meaningful benefits within three to six months.
The admission came six weeks after Zuckerberg’s May layoff memo declared “AI is the most consequential technology of our lifetimes” and that “the companies that lead the way will define the next generation.”
The $145 billion Contradiction Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META | META Price Prediction) has committed to $125 billion to $145 billion in 2026 capex, more than double its $72.215 billion 2025 outlay. In April, Meta inked a $21 billion expanded AI infrastructure deal with CoreWeave through 2032, on top of a 6-gigawatt AMD GPU partnership signed in February. And yet, last week it was reported Meta will rent out capacity much like SpaceX (Nasdaq: SPCX). Bulls have cheered the announcement, noting it gives Meta Platforms more flexibility and could raise substantial revenue in the year ahead.
Bears point ot the fact Meta has enough compute its not able to effectively use it on its products. That could show the company is reaching the limits of AI producing strong ROIC when applied to products from Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp. In the past Meta has managed to continue driving engagement across its product suite (and advertising solutions) through increased AI usage.
Shares trade near $584, down roughly 11.5% year to date and about 18% over the past 12 months, underperforming megacap peers. If AI “hasn’t really accelerated,” what is $145 billion buying?
Who Got Cut, Who Got Protected Meta notified roughly 8,000 employees in May 2026, about 10% of its then-80,000 person workforce. Per CNBC reporting from May 20, 2026, cuts hit integrity teams, cybersecurity, content design, and Reality Labs hardest, while AI infrastructure, foundation models, and AI monetization teams were protected. Another 7,000 employees were redirected into newly created AI-focused teams, and 6,000 planned hires were cancelled.
US workers received 16 weeks severance plus two additional weeks per year of tenure, with health insurance extended 18 months. Zuckerberg told staff: “Success isn’t a given.” CFO Susan Li added on the Q1 call that executives “don’t really know what the optimal size of the company will be in the future.”
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The Human Cost One Meta policy employee told Wired that morale is low because the US workforce feels it is “being used to train the AI models that will replace them.” Meta’s overall employee rating on Blind has fallen 25% from its Q2 2024 peak, with culture ratings down 39%. Median total compensation slipped by nearly $30,000.
The Counterargument Meta’s Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang took to X to defend Meta’s efforts and layer on additional context to Zuckerberg’s quote:
First, Mark was clearly talking about the industry’s progress on agentic capabilities on the whole.
But, while we’re on the topic: Our next Muse Spark update is coming soon. Big improvements in coding and agentic capabilities to be more competitive with other leading models.… https://t.co/uTjx8sZM2A
— Alexandr Wang (@alexandr_wang) July 3, 2026
Wang also claimed that while Meta has lagged rivals, its upcoming model (code-named Watermelon) will equal 5.5 from OpenAI. If Meta can catch up to other ‘frontier labs’ that have made major investments into areas like coding and agentic capabilities, it would go a long way to soothing negative investor sentiment.
An Industry Pattern Meta joins a broader industry trend. Layoffs.fyi counts roughly 110,000 layoffs at 137 tech companies in 2026 so far, after about 125,000 cuts in all of 2025. Goldman Sachs pegs AI-driven layoffs at more than 16,000 payroll cuts per month industry-wide. Cisco cut roughly 4,000 employees the same week as Meta, and Microsoft offered buyouts to about 7% of its US workforce in April.
Zuckerberg’s remark appears to be the first time a major CEO has publicly conceded the acceleration isn’t happening on schedule. Reality Labs alone lost $4.03 billion in Q1 2026. The core ad engine grew revenue 33.08% year over year, but expenses climbed 35%.
If the three-to-six-month window Zuckerberg cited slips, what happens to remaining employees, signed capex commitments, and a stock that has already given back a fifth of its value?
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Space Exploration Technologies (SPCX 0.99%) is Elon Musk's $2 trillion space transportation, satellite internet connectivity, and artificial intelligence (AI) company. Over the past few months, SpaceX has announced a series of deals to rent its excess data center capacity to other AI developers for a lucrative fee, which could amount to billions of dollars in monthly revenue.
According to a Bloomberg report last week, Facebook and Instagram parent company Meta Platforms (META +3.12%) is looking to make a similar move. It has aggressively built AI infrastructure over the past few years to train its Llama models, but it appears CEO Mark Zuckerberg wants to unlock a new revenue stream by renting out its spare computing capacity to other developers.
This could be a highly profitable move for Meta, and it comes at a time when its stock trades at a discount to the broader market. However, there is at least one concern worth considering.
Image source: The Motley Fool.
AI transformed Meta's advertising business More than 3.5 billion people visit at least one of Meta's social media apps every day, and as that number approaches half the world's population, it's becoming harder to find new users. Ordinarily, that would mean the company would face stagnant growth in its advertising business, but it's getting around that challenge by using AI to boost engagement instead.
Meta uses AI in its recommendation algorithms to show users more of the content they enjoy viewing, and that approach is keeping them online for longer periods of time. As a result, each user is seeing more ads, and Meta is making more money. Over time, Mark Zuckerberg believes AI will make the social media experience even more personal by not only providing more accurate recommendations, but also creating content for each specific user.
That vision opens the door to new opportunities. Instead of simply providing users with pure entertainment, Facebook and Instagram will also become useful hubs people visit to improve their lives, whether they want to learn how to cook or they want to follow a specific type of news. This approach could be a game changer in terms of increasing engagement over the long term.
Meta's AI efforts are already showing up in its financial results. The company generated a record $56.3 billion in revenue during the first quarter of 2026 (ended March 31), up 33% from the year-ago period. That growth rate rapidly accelerated from 24% in the fourth quarter of 2025, just three months earlier.
A move into cloud computing could be lucrative, but there is one concern Meta developed a family of open-source large language models (LLMs) called Llama, which are at the foundation of most of its AI initiatives. Building LLMs from scratch isn't cheap, nor is constantly improving them to stay ahead of the competition, which is why Meta's capital expenditures (capex) topped $72 billion last year. Most of the money went toward AI data center infrastructure, including chips and components.
According to management's most recent guidance, that capex figure could more than double to $145 billion during 2026. As the recent Bloomberg report suggests, Meta plans to rent out some of its spare computing capacity to other developers, which will unlock a new revenue stream.
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Meta probably won't compete with other cloud providers, such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, because they offer hundreds of services outside the AI space to help their customers thrive in the digital age. Instead, Meta will probably target the neoclouds such as CoreWeave and Nebius, which offer their customers a very narrow set of tools to help them develop AI software.
Tapping into a new source of revenue can only lead to growth, which is great news. SpaceX could bring in more than $2 billion in revenue per month from the two deals it recently signed to rent computing capacity to Anthropic and Alphabet, so this business model is unquestionably lucrative.
However, I'm wondering why Meta has spare AI capacity in the first place. The AI industry is grappling with a severe shortage of chips and components because there supposedly isn't enough computing power to go around, so it's perplexing that the likes of Meta and SpaceX would willingly rent some of their data centers to other developers. It sounds as if these companies are overbuilding, in my opinion, potentially leading to a crash in the price of computing capacity.
Meta stock looks like a bargain right now While there are some clear risks for Meta to enter the cloud business, investors are getting a very attractive price for its stock right now. It's trading at a price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio of just 21.2, a 25% discount to its 10-year average of 28.4.
META PE Ratio data by YCharts.
Meta is also significantly cheaper than the Nasdaq-100 index, which has a P/E ratio of 35.2, so it appears to be heavily undervalued next to a basket of its big-tech peers. As a result, I think it could be a solid long-term buy right now, no matter what happens with its potential cloud business.
Shares of neocloud infrastructure providers CoreWeave (CRWV +5.82%) and Nebius Group (NBIS 0.90%) were clobbered on July 1 after it emerged that hyperscaler giant Meta Platforms (META +3.12%) plans to compete with them.
CoreWeave stock shed almost 14% of its value in a single session, while Nebius dropped by 17%. Meta Platforms, on the other hand, gained nearly 9% after Bloomberg News reported that the Magnificent Seven company is planning to rent out its excess cloud computing capacity to customers. That doesn't bode well for CoreWeave and Nebius at first, as both companies are in the business of building dedicated AI data centers and renting out their capacity to customers looking to run AI workloads in the cloud.
So, it was easy to see why their shares fell substantially following the Bloomberg News report. In fact, Meta won't just be moving into Nebius and CoreWeave's territory; the tech giant's reported move could also hurt the prospects of these neocloud providers. Let's see why that may be the case.
Image source: Getty Images.
CoreWeave and Nebius have signed massive contracts with Meta Platforms Meta Platforms has been spending aggressively to build AI data center infrastructure capacity. At the same time, the tech giant has been renting capacity from CoreWeave and Nebius to support the rollout of AI tools across its apps and advertising platform.
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CoreWeave expanded its agreement with Meta in April this year to provide cloud computing capacity through December 2032 in a deal worth $21 billion. It is worth noting that the two companies had originally signed a $14.2 billion deal in September 2025. Similarly, Nebius announced in March that it will provide $12 billion in dedicated cloud computing capacity to Meta starting early next year.
What's more, Nebius added that Meta has committed to buying $15 billion in additional capacity over five years, which the neocloud provider had originally planned to sell to other third-party AI cloud customers. The total value of this agreement was worth a whopping $27 billion.
Not surprisingly, shares of Nebius and CoreWeave dropped like a rock after Bloomberg News reported Meta's planned initiative of selling its excess AI computing capacity to customers. However, the report also added that this business plan is currently in development and may change.
The sharp decline in these AI stocks could be a buying opportunity There is no doubt that CoreWeave and Nebius could take a hit if Meta decides to compete with them, especially considering that it is a customer. However, Meta's plan of selling AI computing capacity to customers isn't official yet. But even if that were to be the case, investors shouldn't forget that the demand for CoreWeave and Nebius' dedicated AI data centers is exceeding supply.
CoreWeave management noted on the May earnings call that the demand for its AI cloud platform "is accelerating and we remain largely sold out of our 2026 capacity." Even better, the company's customer base is getting diverse. It had 10 customers at the end of Q1 who had committed to spending at least $1 billion on its cloud platform. CoreWeave points out that 30% of its $99.4 billion revenue backlog was from foundational AI labs, such as Anthropic.
Meanwhile, Nebius management noted on the May earnings call that it typically sees "several customers competing for every GPU we bring online." Nebius also added that every data center that it builds is sold. This explains why both companies have been clocking phenomenal revenue growth.
Data by YCharts
More importantly, both companies are in a solid position to sustain their impressive growth rates. That's because the demand for AI data centers far exceeds supply, a situation that's likely to persist. According to Goldman Sachs, data center power demand in the U.S. is projected to more than double to 66 gigawatts (GW) in 2027 from 31 GW last year.
The strong demand scenario is likely to persist through the end of the decade, with Gartner estimating that the power usage of AI-focused servers could grow from 21% last year to 44% in 2030. The firm also adds that the overall electricity usage of data centers is poised to jump by almost 5x through 2030. So, even if Meta stops being a customer for CoreWeave and Nebius, the neocloud providers can allocate the capacity to other customers.
So, if Meta starts competing with them, there is enough room for another company to join Nebius and CoreWeave in providing AI data center infrastructure. After all, several cloud providers are building and deploying data center capacity, and that hasn't been enough to meet the phenomenal demand. All this explains why CoreWeave and Nebius are anticipated to sustain solid growth rates.
Data by YCharts
Another important point worth noting is that CoreWeave can now be bought at just 6.6 times sales following its latest slide. While Nebius remains expensive at 65 times sales, it can justify that valuation given its stunning growth rate, which could make it a multibagger in the long run. So, the recent pullback in these AI stocks looks like a solid opportunity for investors to buy more shares as they can step on the gas once again on the back of their solid financial growth.
Top Wall Street analysts changed their outlook on these top names. For a complete view of all analyst rating changes, including upgrades, downgrades and initiations, please see our analyst ratings page.
Considering buying META stock? Here’s what analysts think:
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People walk behind a logo of Meta Platforms company, during a conference in Mumbai, India, September 20, 2023. REUTERS/Francis Mascarenhas Purchase Licensing Rights, opens new tab
SummaryCompaniesPenalties were calculated based on state laws in Colorado, California, Kentucky and New JerseyMeta says the number is not supported by evidenceThe company faces thousands of claims over addictive featuresJuly 6 (Reuters) - Meta Platforms (META.O), opens new tab said in a court filing on Monday that four states were seeking $1.4 trillion in penalties over accusations the company designed its Facebook and Instagram platforms to addict young users and misled the public about their safety.
Meta put forward the figure in its response to the attorneys general's filings on how penalties should be calculated if the states prevailed at trial.
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The number, which has not previously been disclosed and is close to Meta’s market capitalization of around $1.5 trillion, comes ahead of an August trial in Oakland, California over the claims brought by California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey against the company.
Meta said the amount was unsupported by the evidence.
"A sanction of that size has no analog in the history of consumer protection enforcement," the company said in the filing.
Representatives for the attorneys general did not immediately respond to requests for comment after the filing.
TALLYING DAMAGESThe states' filings are sealed, but at a court hearing in June they said they were calculating the penalties by multiplying the number of violations by fine amounts set by state law. The number of violations is based on the estimated number of teens and young users affected by Meta's actions, the states said.
Twenty-nine states have sued Meta in federal court, most of them alleging the company violated the federal Children's Online Privacy Protection Act by collecting data from children without proper parental consent. The trial in August before U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers will address all claims brought under that law, plus the four states’ allegations that the company violated their state laws protecting consumers by misleading them about the safety of their platforms.
Meta has denied the allegations, saying the attorneys general have no evidence it misled consumers about its platforms' alleged addictiveness because "social media addiction" is not an established psychiatric condition, and therefore statements that its platforms were not addictive could not be false.
A further 14 states have brought claims under their own laws, which will be heard at a separate trial in February.
Last month, Rogers rejected Meta’s bid to cancel the trial, saying there remained factual disputes over whether its social media platforms were addictive, whether Meta falsely denied it designed them that way, and whether it "partially" directed the platforms at children.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta said after Rogers' ruling that Meta was putting profits ahead of children's safety and breaking consumer protection laws, promising to hold the company "fully accountable" for its role in the teen mental health crisis.
Meta, Snapchat and parent Snap Inc. (SNAP.N), opens new tab, YouTube and parent Alphabet Inc. (GOOGL.O), opens new tab, and TikTok and parent ByteDance are facing thousands of lawsuits in both federal and state court over claims they knowingly designed their platforms to have features that addict children and teens, fueling a mental health crisis.
States across the country have sued the companies, some as part of the case before Rogers and others in their home state courts. New Mexico was the first to go to trial, and a jury awarded the state $375 million in March after finding the company had misled New Mexico consumers.
A judge in New Mexico is currently weighing the second portion of the state’s case, which seeks additional damages and a court order directing the company to make changes to its Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp platforms.
Reporting by Diana Novak Jones; Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi and Kate Mayberry
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab
Diana reports on product liability, litigation, mass torts and the plaintiffs' bar. She previously worked at Law360 and the Chicago Sun-Times.
CoreWeave (CRWV +5.82%) stock plunged 18% over two trading sessions after Bloomberg revealed that Meta Platforms (META +3.12%) is entering the neocloud business. Admittedly, one can understand the concerns, as Meta is a "Magnificent Seven" company with a massive cash hoard and 32 large-scale data centers across the planet.
Although CoreWeave is a smaller enterprise with challenges investors should watch, the cloud stock may not be as vulnerable as some investors have assumed. CoreWeave investors should probably not worry about competition from Meta, and here is why.
Image source: The Motley Fool.
How Meta's entrance into the market may affect CoreWeave Admittedly, CoreWeave stock has struggled despite investor interest from Nvidia, annual revenue growth in the triple digits, and a $99.4 billion backlog. The company has had to dilute its shares and borrow heavily to build the infrastructure needed to meet its current and future contractual obligations. Consequently, it holds almost $25 billion in debt on its balance sheet, a heavy burden for a company with less than $4.8 billion in stockholders' equity.
Also, since the company has incurred ongoing net losses during this growth process, investors are likely to see higher debt and more stock dilution. In that situation, either the failure to meet its obligations or significant slowdowns in its build-out could break its investment thesis.
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However, Mordor Intelligence forecasts a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) for the neocloud of 46% through 2031. That type of growth likely convinced Meta to enter this business. Still, CoreWeave's 112% yearly revenue increase in the first quarter of 2026 far exceeds that CAGR and makes it less likely Meta will derail its investment thesis.
Additionally, Nvidia's interest in the company goes well beyond investing and includes a partnership. That deal gives CoreWeave access to Nvidia's most advanced platforms, including Vera Rubin, giving it a competitive advantage that was likely a factor in its joining the Nasdaq-100 index less than 15 months after the stock's IPO.
Furthermore, its challenges appear to have left CoreWeave with an attractive valuation, despite the aforementioned net losses, which leave it without a P/E ratio. Currently, its price-to-sales (P/S) ratio is about 6.5. That's above the average P/S ratio of 3.7 for the S&P 500 but far below the double-digit P/S ratios often found with growth tech stocks. That low valuation could persuade more investors to take a chance on CoreWeave.
Moving forward with CoreWeave If you can tolerate the risks of buying a company like CoreWeave, the entrance of Meta is more likely to be a buying opportunity than a reason to sell.
Indeed, the idea of competing with a tech giant like Meta seems intimidating. Fortunately, this industry is growing so fast that there is probably room for Meta to enter without significantly hurting CoreWeave.
Moreover, CoreWeave's Nvidia partnership serves as a competitive advantage, and the current P/S ratio allows investors to buy the stock at a low valuation. Thus, instead of fretting about the competition, interested investors should probably take this opportunity to add CoreWeave shares.
Meta remains a Strong Buy as I increase my stake, despite recent legal and regulatory headwinds. META's aggressive CapEx, including a $145B program and AI compute buildout, is offset by monetization strategies like Meta Compute and strategic fintech investments. Valuation remains compelling: META trades at a 19.06 P/E and 0.86 PEG, with robust revenue and net income CAGRs outpacing peers while funding growth from operating cash flow.
Analyst’s Disclosure: I/we have a beneficial long position in the shares of META, GOOG either through stock ownership, options, or other derivatives. I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it (other than from Seeking Alpha). I have no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this article.
Bohdan Kucheriavyi is not a financial/investment advisor, broker, or dealer. He's solely sharing personal experience and opinion; therefore, all strategies, tips, suggestions, and recommendations shared are solely for informational purposes. There are risks associated with investing in securities. Investing in stocks, bonds, options, exchange-traded funds, mutual funds, and money market funds involves the risk of loss. Loss of principal is possible. Some high-risk investments may use leverage, which will accentuate gains & losses. Foreign investing involves special risks, including greater volatility and political, economic, and currency risks and differences in accounting methods. A security’s or a firm’s past investment performance is not a guarantee or predictor of future investment performance.
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Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META | META Price Prediction) has spent the year getting punished for the exact strategy that may end up minting money.
Meta runs the largest advertising machine outside of Google, powered by Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Threads, and Messenger, and has quietly become one of the most aggressive infrastructure builders on the planet. Full-year 2025 capex hit $69.7 billion, up from $37.3 billion in 2024, and the 2026 range was pushed to $125 billion to $145 billion. That is Manhattan Project money for GPUs, custom silicon, and data center capacity.
Shares are down 8.7% year to date and 17.4% over the past year, badly lagging the broader market’s advance in 2026. What changed the conversation was a leaked plan showing Meta intends to sell compute externally. That raises the SpaceX comparison bulls have been waiting for.
The SpaceX playbook comes to Menlo Park SpaceX solved its capex overhang by turning excess capacity into rentable compute. Anthropic agreed to pay $1.25 billion per month for roughly 300 megawatts, and Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) signed a $920 million per month deal for about 110,000 GPUs stretching into mid-2029. That is a $26 billion annual run rate arriving before the S-1 was even dry.
Meta has the same ingredients. It owns the buildout, has already signed $107 billion in new contractual commitments this quarter for multiyear cloud deals and infrastructure purchase agreements, and it is deploying more than one gigawatt of custom silicon developed with Broadcom (NASDAQ:AVGO), alongside a fresh $6.5 billion Samsung foundry deal for its third-generation MTIA accelerator. The core ad engine funds the whole thing. Q1 revenue rose 33% to $56.3 billion at a 41% operating margin, with ad impressions up 19% and price per ad up 12%. Volume and price rising together is rare.
The bear case that keeps working The bear argument is that this remains a capex black hole. Meta burned 60.2% of its operating cash flow on capex in 2025, Reality Labs is still losing roughly $4 billion per quarter, and the Q1 headline EPS of $10.44 was flattered by an $8.03 billion tax benefit. A single Zuckerberg comment on infrastructure spending sent Applied Optoelectronics down 17% in one session. The market is nervous about ROI slippage.
A depreciation cliff looms. D&A of $18.6 billion trails capex of $69.7 billion by a wide margin. Future earnings absorb a rising drag. Regulatory overhangs in the EU and pending US youth-litigation trials add tail risk that valuation multiples do not always price.
Where patience makes a case Nobody actually knows if compute-as-a-service materializes into signed contracts this year. Muse Spark is the first model out of Meta Superintelligence Labs, business AI conversations grew from 1 million to 10 million weekly in a single quarter, and yet monetization is still “currently free for most businesses.”
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Investors could reasonably wait one or two more prints to see whether third-party revenue arrives before paying up.
What the valuation and ratings show Meta trades at roughly 21x times trailing earnings and 19x times forward, cheaper than the broader software complex despite 30%-plus revenue growth. The Street consensus target sits at $828.17, or roughly 39.8% upside, on 57 Buy, 6 Hold, and 0 Sell ratings. The ratings distribution is unusually one-sided.
Prediction markets are catching up too. Polymarket assigns 74.5% probability that Meta ends 2026 with a higher valuation than OpenAI, and Deutsche Bank and Morgan Stanley recently flipped their view of Meta’s AI spend from “cash-burning black hole” to “monetization engine.” Meanwhile the stock underperformed the S&P 500 by a wide margin over the past twelve months, which is the setup value investors typically want.
Why $593 is the right entry At $593, Meta Platforms is a Buy.
The path to price appreciation is bifurcated, and either fork works. If the compute-as-a-service pivot lands even one anchor tenant, Meta reprices as a hyperscaler rather than an ad platform, a multiple expansion story on top of an already-growing earnings base. If it does not, the ad business alone generated $200.97 billion in 2025 revenue at a 41.4% operating margin and continues to compound double digits, which supports the current price without any AI revenue at all.
The entry point matters. Shares sit meaningfully below both the 50-day ($605) and 200-day ($646) moving averages, and the multiple has compressed while earnings have expanded. That is the definition of a re-rating candidate, not an expensive one. The thesis breaks if Reality Labs losses widen materially, if Q2 revenue misses the $58 billion to $61 billion guide, or if promised third-party compute deals fail to materialize by year-end. Those are watchable, not fatal.
The clearest reason to own Meta at this price is that you are getting the ad business at a discount and the AI infrastructure optionality for free.
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SharonAI Holdings shares are showing limited movement. What’s the outlook for SHAZ shares? What Is the Catalyst for SharonAI Holdings?The move comes after a Bloomberg report last week said Meta Platforms is developing a "Meta Compute" initiative that could sell access to AI models hosted on Meta infrastructure and also sell raw compute capacity to outside customers.
For SharonAI, positioned as an AI infrastructure/neocloud provider, the worry is that a hyperscaler monetizing excess capacity could make GPU compute feel less scarce and pressure pricing.
SharonAI’s sensitivity here is amplified by its growth posture, with the company recently highlighting a $1.6 billion financing tied to AI factory expansion across Australia and Asia-Pacific, raising the stakes on maintaining premium pricing.
Traders are also watching how quickly Meta could move from internal infrastructure to selling to outside customers, which would directly reset scarcity assumptions for smaller neoclouds.
Critical Price Levels To Watch for SHAZEven with the premarket pop, the stock is trading 4.1% below its 20-day SMA ($76.16), which keeps the near-term trend in "prove it" mode after a recent swing high in June. At the same time, it’s still 14.1% above the 50-day SMA ($64.00) and 48.3% above the 100-day SMA ($49.22), so the bigger-picture uptrend from the spring low is still intact.
RSI is the cleaner momentum read right now: at 45.25, it’s neutral, which fits a market that’s digesting June’s breakout and recent pullback rather than trending aggressively. RSI measures how stretched a move is, and this level suggests SHAZ isn’t extended—meaning the next push likely depends more on news flow and follow-through than on "overbought" pressure.
The bullish 20-day SMA-over-50-day SMA crossover supports the idea that dips have been getting bought on a multi-week view, but the stock still has to reclaim its short-term averages to turn that into a cleaner continuation setup. On levels, $87.00 stands out as the nearby ceiling—both a round-number area and a spot where rebounds can stall if buyers don’t show sustained demand.
Key Resistance: $87.00 — a nearby round-number area where rebounds can stall What Is SharonAI Holdings and Its Business Model?SharonAI Holdings is a neocloud operator built for AI and high-performance computing, selling GPU/CPU compute infrastructure for training and inference workloads. Its offerings span Sovereign AI Australia, GPU-as-a-Service, SHARON AI Cloud and Private Cloud, plus virtual private clusters and HPC servers.
SHAZ Stock Price MovementSHAZ Stock Price Activity: SharonAI Holdings shares were up 17.21% at $79.60 Monday morning according to Benzinga Pro data.
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Nebius Group N.V. remains an ultra-bullish AI cloud play despite market fears of overbuild following Meta's potential entry into compute capacity sales. Recent GPU price hikes and high-value SpaceX compute deals indicate robust AI demand, supporting future price increases for NBIS's capacity. NBIS's five-year, up to $27 billion deal with Meta, plus the potential for further excess compute sales, positions the company for significant revenue upside.
CoreWeave stock is charging ahead with explosive momentum. What’s behind CRWV gains? The recent sell-off was tied to chatter that Meta Platforms is exploring an expansion into AI computing services, which raised concerns it could become a new competitor in the "neocloud" market. Rosenblatt reiterated a Buy rating and kept a $250.00 price forecast, arguing demand checks for GPU capacity show no change and that shortages remain common.
Rosenblatt also argued Meta likely can’t resell capacity it has leased from CoreWeave through 2032, a key detail bulls are using to frame the competitive risk as more narrative than near-term revenue hit.
CoreWeave Stock: Key Levels To WatchEven after Monday’s pop, the longer-term trend is still heavy: the stock is down 46.41% over the past 12 months and is trading well below its major moving averages (about 15% under the 20-day SMA and about 21% under the 50-day SMA). That "below all the averages" setup usually means rallies can turn into selling opportunities unless price can reclaim those trend lines.
Momentum also argues for caution: MACD is below its signal line and the histogram is negative, which suggests upside pressure is fading rather than building. In plain terms, MACD compares faster and slower trend momentum, and being below the signal line typically means the recent bounce hasn’t flipped the momentum backdrop yet.
Key Resistance: $88.50 — a nearby ceiling where rebounds can stall, sitting just above current price and acting like a near-term pivot zone Key Support: $70.50 — a downside level near the lower end of the 52-week range where buyers previously showed up Structurally, the chart is sending mixed messages: the 20-day SMA is below the 50-day SMA (bearish), but the 50-day SMA is still above the 200-day SMA after the golden cross in May. The problem is follow-through—shares have since slipped back under both averages, which has muted the bullish read from that May crossover.
What Is CoreWeave’s Business Model?CoreWeave is a modern cloud infrastructure company that offers Nvidia GPUs and other essential AI hardware with optimized efficiency to handle the most demanding AI training and inference workloads. Its cloud platform supports the development and use of foundational large language models and the delivery of next-generation AI applications to satisfy the growing demand for AI around the world.
That’s why the Meta competition narrative matters: if hyperscalers or mega-cap platforms try to monetize excess compute, investors immediately question pricing power and customer stickiness for specialized GPU cloud providers. Bulls are leaning on the idea that GPU capacity is still tight and that existing contracts and access to hardware remain key differentiators.
CoreWeave Stock Price Movement on MondayCRWV Stock Price Activity: CoreWeave shares were up 4.93% at $85.78 at the time of publication on Monday, according to Benzinga Pro data.
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Rotation is the theme of markets right now, says Tom White, pointing to selling in AI chip stocks while other corners of Wall Street rallied. Memory stocks remain in focus, as Tom points to movers like Micron (MU) in the U.S. and SK Hynix abroad with plans to make a domestic debut.
A Chinese smart-glasses maker founded by an Apple veteran has become a unicorn after a funding round with investors including Meituan and Tencent.
Even Realities Technology raised $150 million in the pre-Series B round, giving it a valuation of $1 billion. Company's founder and CEO Will Wang, who worked at Apple from 2016 to 2018 and was involved in the development and mass production of Apple Watch and iPhone, is eyeing the AI wearable market dominated by Meta Platforms.
The company will use the funds to develop its next-generation smart glasses platform, deepen AI integration, scale up global operations and accelerate product innovation, it said Monday.
The Shenzhen-based startup joined a slew of global peers, including Meta Platform, to build advanced gadgets and electronics that bring the benefits of AI to individual users. Alibaba launched Quark AI glasses in February.
Even Realities, which was founded in 2023, launched the Even G2 smart glasses with a bigger display in a lighter frame late last year, alongside the Even R1, a smart ring that controls the display of the G2. The company attributed its vision for Even G2 in part to Wang's stint at Apple.
Unlike Meta's camera-equipped Ray-Ban line, Even Realities' flagship G2 glasses have no camera or recording hardware, while sending messages, navigation, and live translation through a heads-up display embedded in the lenses – as the startup stresses user privacy.
"The future isn't about pulling out a device every time you need information," Wang said. "It's about having the right information available exactly when you need it, while remaining fully present in the world around you."
More than half of Even Realities' user base is located in the U.S., as are approximately 80% of its developers, the company said.
The global smart glasses category surged 167% from a year earlier in the first quarter, shipping 2.25 million units worldwide, according to consultancy firm IDC. Meta led the pack with nearly 70% market share, followed by augmented reality-equipped glasses maker Shenzhen RayNeo Technology and Chinese consumer electronics maker Xiaomi, according to IDC.
Growth was driven by mainstream adoption of display-less smart glasses, led by Meta's Ray-Ban partnership, according to IDC.
Global shipment of smart glasses, including those with display glasses or virtual-reality functions, is expected to more than double to 50 million in 2030.
Even Realities has largely been funded by Chinese-origin venture capital and private equity firms, including CDH Investment, Monolith Management, and CVC Capital. It raised an undisclosed amount from Hong Kong-headquartered Unicorn Capital Partners and Cyanhill Capital in January.
Its domestic rival Rokid is valued at $2.58 billion, according to PitchBook data, after the latest round that raised $522 million in March. RayNeo, incubated by TCL Electronics, is worth $239.9 million, according to PitchBook.
— CNBC's Serenitie Wang contributed to this report.
Meta Platforms (META 4.80%) has been one of the best companies at applying artificial intelligence (AI) to its core business to drive growth. However, the stock has nonetheless struggled amid investor concerns about its high spending on data center infrastructure.
The company helped allay investors' fears when it was announced that the social media giant planned to sell excess computing power and launch its own cloud business. The move would put it into the same business as Amazon, Microsoft, and Alphabet.
Like all three of those companies, Meta has a strong, growing core business that generates substantial operating cash flow. However, it has been their cloud computing units that have driven growth for these companies, as demand for both AI infrastructure services and solutions has been insatiable.
Image source: The Motley Fool.
Moving to the cloud According to Bloomberg, Meta is still deciding whether to sell access to its computing infrastructure or host large language models (LLMs) in its data centers. Meta has developed its own LLMs, and many cloud providers offer their customers third-party AI models like those from Anthropic and OpenAI.
Regardless of which route it goes, the move into cloud computing demonstrates that there is currently so much demand for these services that it is difficult to overbuild your own AI infrastructure, since you can just rent it out to someone else. This is also something that Elon Musk's Space Exploration Technologies (a.k.a. SpaceX) has done, getting strong rates from other players in the field that need the capacity.
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For the stock, it should let investors focus on Meta's core business, which has been hitting on all cylinders. Last quarter, the company saw its revenue growth accelerate, climbing 33% to $56.3 billion.
The growth was driven by a combination of increased ad impressions, which jumped 19% year over year, and higher ad prices, which climbed 12% year over year. Meta is using AI to improve its recommendation algorithm, which keeps users on its apps longer and allows it to serve more ads to them. At the same time, AI is helping advertisers better target and convert users, which is driving up ad prices.
Despite its strong and accelerating revenue growth, Meta trades at a forward price-to-earnings ratio (P/E) of only 18 times this year's analyst estimates. That's cheap for a leading company with that type of growth.
With the move into cloud computing helping ease concerns about overspending and bolstering its strong core business, Meta is one of my favorite AI stocks to own right now for the long term.
Geoffrey Seiler has positions in Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta Platforms. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Alphabet, Amazon, Meta Platforms, and Microsoft. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
The Indian government has warned of action against two of Meta's three major platforms, WhatsApp and Instagram, within a week, underscoring the growing regulatory risks the U.S. social media giant faces in a key market.
On Saturday, India's Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology issued a "stern notice to Meta over the presence of Child Sexual Exploitative & Abuse Material (CSEAM) in paid advertisements on Instagram," according to a report by Indian state broadcaster DD News.
The government has directed Instagram to "immediately disable all advertisements and content that promote" child abuse and has sought a detailed explanation from Meta within seven days, the report said.
The regulatory warning to Meta came after an investigation by the BBC revealed on Friday that Instagram was running paid advertisements promoting child sexual abuse material in India.
Meta has a "Zero tolerance policy" for child abuse-related content, a spokesperson for Meta told CNBC in an email. The company is using "AI technology to proactively detect violating content and individuals, but we are in a constant battle with criminals who hide among our 3.5 billion users and try to evade our detection," it added.
Earlier this year, the European Commission found that the social media giant was violating EU law by failing to prevent children below 13 from accessing its platforms. Though Meta had disagreed with the preliminary findings, it could face fines of up to 6% of its total worldwide annual turnover if the findings are confirmed.
The U.S. company is not facing an immediate risk of a fine in India, but has come under sharp regulatory scrutiny in its biggest market. The country has the largest audience base for Instagram, with more than 480 million users, more than double the U.S. as of 2025, as per data from Statista. It also has more than 400 million Facebook users, the most globally.
Neil Shah, vice president of research at Counterpoint Research, said this was a "wake-up call for Meta to tighten its compliance and control for its platforms" as the Indian government is keen "to tighten the leash over these massive digital platforms."
Last week, Meta's messaging app, WhatsApp, which has over half a million users in India, was also issued a warning over the roll-out of its username feature. The government claimed the feature could increase cybercrime incidents and has directed the platform to pause its plans.
Meta defended the introduction of usernames, calling it a "major privacy feature" designed to help people stay connected without giving away phone numbers.
"I would describe India as a more demanding regulatory market rather than a hostile one," Reema Bhattacharya, head of Asia research at Verisk Maplecroft, told CNBC. Given India's importance as a key digital market, she added that companies should expect regulators to engage more actively on "issues ranging from online safety to data governance."
Meta Platforms (META 4.80%) has been a jarring growth stock over the past year. It's down by 15% year to date, but its fundamentals continue to improve. The stock only trades at a price-to-earnings ratio of 20 and has solid growth rates already, so a single catalyst could result in a meaningful rally.
Reality Labs could be the catalyst. It's the AI hardware part of Meta Platforms' business that includes Quest headsets and Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses. Here's what investors should know.
Image source: Getty Images.
Meta Glasses can become a major hit Meta Glasses are an innovative technology that let you take pictures, speak with AI tools, make and receive calls, and type on virtual surfaces just by wearing them. You don't have to pull out a smartphone to do any of those things anymore.
Meta Platforms debuted Meta Glasses in June with prices starting at $224. Payment plans are available starting at $19 per month, which lasts for two years at 0% APR. These prices are well within the ballpark of what many people can pay, including the $19 monthly plan. This technology is no longer science fiction, and just as importantly, it's more accessible to the average consumer.
While Meta Platforms released smart glasses a few years ago that had a relatively muted reception, those smart glasses were technologically limited and had no AI capabilities. They just let you take pictures using your glasses instead of taking out your smartphone. They were pretty much cameras with no other features. These current AI glasses are far more advanced, which can help them generate more traction.
The company has a massive head start compared to competitors in this new industry. It controls 85% of the AI glasses industry and already has 3.56 billion daily active users on its family of apps, which is a 4% year-over-year increase. Meta Platforms can promote its AI Glasses to its vast user base to get quick momentum and preserve its comfortable lead over competitors.
Having control over a high-potential industry remains compelling. Grand View Research projects a 24.2% CAGR for the smart glasses market through 2033, but the research company also estimates that the smart glasses market is only worth $3.2 billion. If it gets anywhere close to the smartphone market's $556.4 billion total valuation, this early start will be massive.
The success of Meta's AI Glasses should make it much easier for the company to sell other consumer hardware, similar to how Apple sells iPhones and MacBooks. The AI Glasses segment may be a sleeping giant, and the stock's 20 P/E ratio leaves a lot of room for upside momentum if that proves to be the case.
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Meta Platforms is already delivering high growth rates Even though Meta Platforms' stock has been stuck in the mud for more than a year, it continues to gain market share in the online advertising industry. Revenue surged by 33% year over year in Q1, with operating income rising by 30%. Meta Platforms closed out the first quarter with a robust 41% operating profit margin, which makes the current valuation even more baffling.
Meta Platforms' vast amount of capital and high profits make it easier to invest heavily into projects like AI Glasses until they become profitable. AI Glasses can also give Meta Platforms' advertising revenue a boost by creating more ad impressions.
Meta AI Glasses don't have to make up a big portion of total revenue right now. Just an announcement in the upcoming Q2 earnings release that shows meaningful momentum in this segment, combined with results investors have become accustomed to, may be enough to trigger a rally.
The AI arms race has entered a new phase. For the past three years, the biggest technology companies have competed by buying as many Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA | NVDA Price Prediction) GPUs as they could get their hands on. Now they’re racing to build something even more valuable: their own AI chips.
That shift is about more than lowering costs. It gives hyperscalers greater control over performance, supply chains, and the pace of innovation. Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META) appears ready to take another major step in that direction with a reported $6.5 billion agreement that could strengthen its long-term AI ambitions while reshaping the semiconductor landscape.
Meta Is Building More Than Just Another AI Chip According to reports from Korean media, Meta is negotiating a roughly $6.5 billion agreement with Samsung Foundry to manufacture its third-generation Meta Training and Inference Accelerator (MTIA) processors. Unlike the first two MTIA generations, which were built by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (NYSE:TSM), the new chips would be produced using Samsung’s cutting-edge 2-nanometer SF2 manufacturing process featuring Gate-All-Around (GAA) transistor technology.
The scale of the reported agreement stands out. The contract reportedly covers hundreds of thousands of semiconductor wafers, making it one of Samsung Foundry’s largest AI orders after its reported $16.5 billion Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) agreement.
The supplier change is just as important as the technology.
MTIA Generation Manufacturing Partner Strategic Focus First Generation TSM Launch custom AI silicon Second Generation TSM Expand AI inference capabilities Third Generation (reported) Samsung Foundry Diversify supply chain and adopt 2nm process This isn’t simply about building faster chips. It’s about ensuring Meta can keep expanding its AI infrastructure without depending on a single manufacturing partner.
Why This Matters for Meta’s AI Strategy Meta has made no secret of its AI ambitions. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said the company plans to invest hundreds of billions of dollars in AI infrastructure while targeting as much as 5 gigawatts of computing capacity by 2030. That scale demands more than buying Nvidia hardware — it requires custom silicon optimized for Meta’s own Llama models and recommendation engines.
Custom chips also improve economics. NVIDIA’s GPUs remain the gold standard for AI training, but they command premium pricing and face periodic supply constraints. By designing its own accelerators, Meta can tailor performance to its workloads while reducing dependence on outside suppliers.
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Looking ahead, these chips could support something even bigger. As Meta expands into AI cloud services, proprietary hardware could become a competitive advantage, much like Amazon‘s (NASDAQ:AMZN) AWS built custom Graviton processors or Google developed its Tensor Processing Units (TPUs).
The Bigger Trend Investors Should Watch Meta isn’t acting alone. Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOG), Amazon, Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), and Tesla have all invested heavily in custom AI silicon. The common goal is simple: reduce long-term infrastructure costs while differentiating their AI platforms.
That doesn’t spell the end for Nvidia. Training frontier AI models will continue requiring enormous numbers of GPUs for years. But inference — the process of actually running AI models — and specialized workloads increasingly favor application-specific chips that consume less power and cost less to operate.
Samsung also benefits if the reported agreement closes. After trailing TSM in advanced manufacturing for years, landing another hyperscaler on its 2nm process would strengthen its credibility and help build momentum for its foundry business.
Key Takeaway In short, Meta’s reported $6.5 billion Samsung agreement is about far more than changing chip suppliers. It’s another sign that the largest AI companies are shifting from buying generic hardware to building customized infrastructure designed around their own software.
Granted, Nvidia remains the dominant force in AI accelerators, and custom chips won’t replace its GPUs overnight. That said, investors should recognize the broader trend. The AI chip market is becoming more fragmented, with hyperscalers increasingly controlling their own destinies.
Ultimately, Meta’s reported move strengthens its long-term competitive position by lowering supply chain risk, improving cost control, and supporting future cloud ambitions. For long-term shareholders, that’s the real story — and one worth following well beyond the latest headline.
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The company will be renting excess computing capacity, and that is big news for two reasons.
*Stock prices used were the afternoon prices of July 1, 2026. The video was published on July 3, 2026.
Parkev Tatevosian, CFA has positions in Meta Platforms. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Meta Platforms. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. Parkev Tatevosian is an affiliate of The Motley Fool and may be compensated for promoting its services. If you choose to subscribe through his link, he will earn some extra money that supports his channel. His opinions remain his own and are unaffected by The Motley Fool.
The market is focused these days on the immense amount of capital flooding the artificial intelligence (AI) build-out. The hyperscalers are getting all the attention as they embark on an extraordinary investment cycle.
Meta Platforms (META 4.80%) is one such business. The dominant social media platform, which has historically posted huge profits and free cash flow, plans to spend $125 billion to $145 billion on capital expenditures (capex) in 2026, mostly for AI infrastructure. That upper bound is about double the $72 billion figure from last year.
Investors are probably wondering why Meta is transitioning from a capital-light business to a capital-intensive one. There might only be one reason.
Image source: The Motley Fool.
It's all about Meta's advertising On the Q1 2025 earnings call, Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company has five major opportunities related to the AI revolution. The list includes better recommendations and content, business messaging, the Meta AI assistant, and AI devices. But perhaps the most important priority is leveraging AI to improve advertising capabilities.
"Our goal is to make it so that any business can basically tell us what objective they're trying to achieve -- like selling something or getting a new customer -- and how much they're willing to pay for each result, and then we just do the rest," Zuckerberg mentioned on the call.
He continued by saying that if Meta is successful in this regard, then "the increased productivity from AI will make advertising a meaningfully larger share of global GDP than it is today."
Connect the dots, and it becomes clear that Meta's ultimate goal is to keep growing its ad revenue at a rapid clip over the long haul. Ad sales totaled $55 billion in the first quarter (ended March 31), representing 98% of the company's entire top line. Advertising is what Meta is all about. That's not going to change.
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The market looks concerned During Q1, Meta reported a 19% year-over-year increase in ad impressions, while the average price per ad rose 12%. These two variables helped lift the company's revenue by 33% compared to the first quarter of 2025. That was the fastest growth rate since Q3 2021.
To justify the $135 billion in capex earmarked for 2026, investors will become more demanding about Meta's financial performance. In fact, they probably already are, as the "Magnificent Seven" stock is down 15% in 2026 (as of June 29) and 29% off its record.
Time will tell whether this AI capex boom will lead to satisfactory returns for one of the world's elite businesses.
Meta Platforms Inc (NASDAQ:META, XETRA:FB2A, SIX:FB) CEO Mark Zuckerberg has acknowledged shortcomings in Meta’s sweeping restructuring efforts during an internal town hall on Thursday, saying the company’s AI agent systems had not advanced as quickly as expected, according to a recording heard by Reuters.
Zuckerberg said the restructuring, which included major job cuts and a broad reassignment of employees toward artificial intelligence initiatives, had not been as “clean” as it could have been and that executives miscalculated the timing of the changes.
He added that Meta’s bets on the new organizational structure had “not come to fruition yet.”
The comments come after Meta in May laid off about 10% of its global workforce and shifted roughly 7,000 employees into AI-focused teams. The changes were part of a wider effort to free up resources for large-scale investments in AI infrastructure and to position the company to benefit from efficiency gains from AI-assisted work.
The restructuring prompted internal pushback and raised concerns among employees about morale, though Zuckerberg previously told staff he did not expect further companywide layoffs this year.
According to the recording, Zuckerberg said “the trajectory of the agentic development over at least the last four months hasn’t really accelerated in the way that we expected,” referring to AI agents, automated systems designed to perform tasks on behalf of users.
He said internal discussions earlier this year had been driven by concerns that Meta was not moving quickly enough to adapt. Zuckerberg added that executives had been “super optimistic” about tools such as Claude Code from AI startup Anthropic during the planning stages of the restructuring.
Despite the slower-than-expected progress, Zuckerberg said he anticipates Meta will begin seeing more meaningful benefits from its AI investments within the next three to six months.
Meta is projected to spend as much as $145 billion on AI infrastructure this year, part of a broader wave of spending by Big Tech companies that collectively exceeds $700 billion focused on artificial intelligence.
A Meta spokesperson declined to comment on the report, according to Reuters.
Shares of Meta finished Thursday’s session down 5% at about $583.
Meta Platforms Inc (NASDAQ:META, XETRA:FB2A, SIX:FB) CEO Mark Zuckerberg has acknowledged shortcomings in Meta’s sweeping restructuring efforts during an internal town hall on Thursday, saying the company’s AI agent systems had not advanced as quickly as expected, according to a recording heard by Reuters.
Zuckerberg said the restructuring, which included major job cuts and a broad reassignment of employees toward artificial intelligence initiatives, had not been as “clean” as it could have been and that executives miscalculated the timing of the changes.
He added that Meta’s bets on the new organizational structure had “not come to fruition yet.”
The comments come after Meta in May laid off about 10% of its global workforce and shifted roughly 7,000 employees into AI-focused teams. The changes were part of a wider effort to free up resources for large-scale investments in AI infrastructure and to position the company to benefit from efficiency gains from AI-assisted work.
The restructuring prompted internal pushback and raised concerns among employees about morale, though Zuckerberg previously told staff he did not expect further companywide layoffs this year.
According to the recording, Zuckerberg said “the trajectory of the agentic development over at least the last four months hasn’t really accelerated in the way that we expected,” referring to AI agents, automated systems designed to perform tasks on behalf of users.
He said internal discussions earlier this year had been driven by concerns that Meta was not moving quickly enough to adapt. Zuckerberg added that executives had been “super optimistic” about tools such as Claude Code from AI startup Anthropic during the planning stages of the restructuring.
Despite the slower-than-expected progress, Zuckerberg said he anticipates Meta will begin seeing more meaningful benefits from its AI investments within the next three to six months.
Meta is projected to spend as much as $145 billion on AI infrastructure this year, part of a broader wave of spending by Big Tech companies that collectively exceeds $700 billion focused on artificial intelligence.
A Meta spokesperson declined to comment on the report, according to Reuters.
Shares of Meta finished Thursday’s session down 5% at about $583.
SummaryMeta Platforms is rated a Strong Buy due to accelerating revenue growth, driven by AI-enhanced advertising and expanding monetization avenues.META's AI-powered Advantage+ campaigns deliver 17% higher ROAS and 32% lower CPA, fueling advertiser spend and supporting sustained revenue growth.Subscriptions and wearables offer incremental upside, while Reality Labs' AI glasses show rapid adoption, though profitability remains a wildcard.Custom ASIC investments are expected to mitigate long-term CapEx pressures, potentially boosting free cash flow margins and supporting high-teens CAGR returns. Kira-Yan/iStock Editorial via Getty Images
Investment Thesis Meta Platforms (META) has been investing heavily in AI infrastructure, which has investors concerned as to whether or not they will see a return on these massive investments. Despite these doubts, Meta is experiencing revenue growth acceleration, which is being driven
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Analyst’s Disclosure: I/we have a beneficial long position in the shares of META either through stock ownership, options, or other derivatives. I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it (other than from Seeking Alpha). I have no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this article.
Seeking Alpha's Disclosure: Past performance is no guarantee of future results. No recommendation or advice is being given as to whether any investment is suitable for a particular investor. Any views or opinions expressed above may not reflect those of Seeking Alpha as a whole. Seeking Alpha is not a licensed securities dealer, broker or US investment adviser or investment bank. Our analysts are third party authors that include both professional investors and individual investors who may not be licensed or certified by any institute or regulatory body.
The hosts at TBPN spent a segment this week chewing over a report from NPR’s Bobby Allen that Meta (NASDAQ:META | META Price Prediction) considered acquiring Kalshi before deciding to build its own prediction-market app. If you have been ignoring prediction markets, the short version is that they let people place real money on future events. Elections. Box office. Whether the Fed cuts. Whoever guesses right gets paid.
So Meta, a company sitting on a $1.48 trillion market cap and an advertising business that just booked $55.024 billion in a single quarter, wants to bolt a betting product onto the top of it. The TBPN crew was not sold. One guest called the idea a “poison golden egg”.
What the Kalshi bid signals The target matters. Kalshi is a CFTC-regulated exchange running real-money contracts. Manifold, the other obvious option, runs play-money and social reputation. One guest observed that the attempted acquisition of Kalshi rather than Manifold suggests Meta is going “the financially incentivized route” rather than a clout-based model.
Translation. Meta is chasing real-money infrastructure that would put wagering inside Instagram and Facebook, apps used by teenagers, grandparents, and roughly 3.56 billion daily active people. The scale is the point, and also the problem.
Meanwhile, Kalshi’s founder Tarek has spent recent weeks taking shots at Instagram and calling it brain rot. Awkward posture for a would-be acquisition target. It also tells you the prediction-market world does not necessarily want to be swallowed by a social-media empire.
Why the ad engine sits at risk Jordi Hays’s framing is the cleanest way to think about this. Meta has a “golden goose” already producing golden eggs, and a prediction-market integration could be a “poison golden egg” that kills the main business. Advertising accounted for roughly 98% of revenue last quarter, with ad impressions up 19% year over year and price per ad up 12%. Q1 revenue grew 33.08% to $56.311 billion. Details are in the company’s Q1 2026 8-K exhibit.
That cash pays for everything else, including $125 to $145 billion of 2026 capex earmarked for AI infrastructure and Meta Superintelligence Labs. Threaten the ad engine and you threaten the AI ambition too.
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A prediction-market product inside the family of apps is, by definition, gambling-adjacent. Regulators already circling Meta on youth safety, teen mental health, and data privacy will treat “play-money” nomenclature as a rounding error. Once betting mechanics live inside a social feed, the political story writes itself.
Weighing the regulatory tradeoff On the show, Hays asked, “Is the potential profit pool worth the risk of all the attention you’re going to get from lawmakers globally by integrating like betting into the product that is already under attack on like a million different fronts?”
Consider those fronts. Youth-related litigation with additional trials scheduled in 2026 may result in material losses. EU regulators are pressuring the Less Personalized Ads model. A theatrical film about the company is on the way. Adding a gambling-flavored product to that pile is the corporate equivalent of walking into a courtroom wearing a “sue me” T-shirt.
The upside is real yet modest. Kalshi is a fast-growing venue, but total volumes are a rounding error next to Meta’s ad revenue. The downside is a regulatory backlash that could constrain the very ad-targeting engine funding the AI buildout.
Meta shares closed at $612.91 on July 1, down roughly 6.99% year to date, and slid again into Thursday’s session. The tape is not yet pricing serious damage from the betting-app plan. For a regular investor, the question worth holding in your head is whether incremental revenue from prediction markets could ever compensate for a single meaningful hit to the advertising franchise. TBPN’s guests think the answer is no. The math of a golden goose suggests they might be right.
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Analyst’s Disclosure: I/we have a beneficial long position in the shares of META, NBIS, CRWV, GOOG, AMZN, MSFT either through stock ownership, options, or other derivatives. I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it (other than from Seeking Alpha). I have no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this article.
Seeking Alpha's Disclosure: Past performance is no guarantee of future results. No recommendation or advice is being given as to whether any investment is suitable for a particular investor. Any views or opinions expressed above may not reflect those of Seeking Alpha as a whole. Seeking Alpha is not a licensed securities dealer, broker or US investment adviser or investment bank. Our analysts are third party authors that include both professional investors and individual investors who may not be licensed or certified by any institute or regulatory body.
Meta Platforms (META - Free Report) is one of the stocks most watched by Zacks.com visitors lately. So, it might be a good idea to review some of the factors that might affect the near-term performance of the stock.
Shares of this social media company have returned -7.1% over the past month versus the Zacks S&P 500 composite's -1.7% change. The Zacks Internet - Software industry, to which Meta Platforms belongs, has lost 3.9% over this period. Now the key question is: Where could the stock be headed in the near term?
Although media reports or rumors about a significant change in a company's business prospects usually cause its stock to trend and lead to an immediate price change, there are always certain fundamental factors that ultimately drive the buy-and-hold decision.
Earnings Estimate RevisionsRather than focusing on anything else, we at Zacks prioritize evaluating the change in a company's earnings projection. This is because we believe the fair value for its stock is determined by the present value of its future stream of earnings.
We essentially look at how sell-side analysts covering the stock are revising their earnings estimates to reflect the impact of the latest business trends. And if earnings estimates go up for a company, the fair value for its stock goes up. A higher fair value than the current market price drives investors' interest in buying the stock, leading to its price moving higher. This is why empirical research shows a strong correlation between trends in earnings estimate revisions and near-term stock price movements.
Meta Platforms is expected to post earnings of $7.09 per share for the current quarter, representing a year-over-year change of -0.7%. Over the last 30 days, the Zacks Consensus Estimate has changed +0.6%.
The consensus earnings estimate of $33.11 for the current fiscal year indicates a year-over-year change of +41%. This estimate has changed +0.4% over the last 30 days.
For the next fiscal year, the consensus earnings estimate of $35.18 indicates a change of +6.3% from what Meta Platforms is expected to report a year ago. Over the past month, the estimate has changed +0.5%.
Having a strong externally audited track record, our proprietary stock rating tool, the Zacks Rank, offers a more conclusive picture of a stock's price direction in the near term, since it effectively harnesses the power of earnings estimate revisions. Due to the size of the recent change in the consensus estimate, along with three other factors related to earnings estimates, Meta Platforms is rated Zacks Rank #3 (Hold).
The chart below shows the evolution of the company's forward 12-month consensus EPS estimate:
12 Month EPS
Revenue Growth ForecastWhile earnings growth is arguably the most superior indicator of a company's financial health, nothing happens as such if a business isn't able to grow its revenues. After all, it's nearly impossible for a company to increase its earnings for an extended period without increasing its revenues. So, it's important to know a company's potential revenue growth.
In the case of Meta Platforms, the consensus sales estimate of $60.2 billion for the current quarter points to a year-over-year change of +26.7%. The $253.41 billion and $303.94 billion estimates for the current and next fiscal years indicate changes of +26.1% and +19.9%, respectively.
Last Reported Results and Surprise HistoryMeta Platforms reported revenues of $56.31 billion in the last reported quarter, representing a year-over-year change of +33.1%. EPS of $7.31 for the same period compares with $6.43 a year ago.
Compared to the Zacks Consensus Estimate of $55.49 billion, the reported revenues represent a surprise of +1.47%. The EPS surprise was +8.94%.
The company beat consensus EPS estimates in each of the trailing four quarters. The company topped consensus revenue estimates each time over this period.
ValuationNo investment decision can be efficient without considering a stock's valuation. Whether a stock's current price rightly reflects the intrinsic value of the underlying business and the company's growth prospects is an essential determinant of its future price performance.
While comparing the current values of a company's valuation multiples, such as price-to-earnings (P/E), price-to-sales (P/S), and price-to-cash flow (P/CF), with its own historical values helps determine whether its stock is fairly valued, overvalued, or undervalued, comparing the company relative to its peers on these parameters gives a good sense of the reasonability of the stock's price.
As part of the Zacks Style Scores system, the Zacks Value Style Score (which evaluates both traditional and unconventional valuation metrics) organizes stocks into five groups ranging from A to F (A is better than B; B is better than C; and so on), making it helpful in identifying whether a stock is overvalued, rightly valued, or temporarily undervalued.
Meta Platforms is graded C on this front, indicating that it is trading at par with its peers. Click here to see the values of some of the valuation metrics that have driven this grade.
ConclusionThe facts discussed here and much other information on Zacks.com might help determine whether or not it's worthwhile paying attention to the market buzz about Meta Platforms. However, its Zacks Rank #3 does suggest that it may perform in line with the broader market in the near term.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted AI agents haven't progressed the way the social-media company hopes but that doesn't mean he's giving up on the technology.
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Tagy: sazby, Nvidia, Japonsko, akcie, USA, Evropa, ekonomika, dluhopisy, AI, HDp, Investiční výhled 2026
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03.07.2026 13:20Investiční výhled na druhé pololetí: Zhodnocení první poloviny roku 2026 11:33Perly týdne: Nutnost vládní kontroly nad AI a OpenAI jako bublina 10:47Pátek bez Ameriky přináší zklidnění, akcie převážně zelené 9:00Rozbřesk: Proč Němci končí a Španělé jdou dál, aneb souvisí spolu ekonomická výkonnost a sportovní úspěch? 8:52Slabá data z trhu práce podpořila akcie, Tesla překvapila růstem a Trumpův tlak na Fed neustává 6:15Je AI bublina blízko prasknutí? Co říká pět oblíbených tržních indikátorů 02.07.2026 17:15Na půl plné a prázdné investiční sklenice a sázky na jednu kartu 16:25Grantham: Nevěřit býčí propagandě 15:49Nezaměstnanost v EU zůstala v květnu na 5,9 procenta, nejníž je v ČR a Bulharsku 15:46Slabá data opět zamlžila pohled na americký trh práce, obavy z Fedu nemizí 12:51Technologičtí giganti přišli o dva biliony dolarů. Trh odměňuje výrobce čipů, ne jejich zákazníky 11:32Světové akciové indexy letos rostou, nejvíce v Koreji, Japonsku a na Tchaj-wanu 10:55AstraZeneca jako sázka na defenzivu mimo AI horečku 10:45Techy rozhodila zpráva Mety a japonský tlak trvá. Do toho vyjdou důležitá data 9:28Rozbřesk: Dosažení plánovaného schodku 310 mld. Kč není bez rizika 8:56OpenAI zvažuje podíl pro americkou vládu, KNDS odkládá IPO a SK Hynix prudce klesá 6:08Kde hledat příležitosti ve druhé polovině roku? Deutsche Bank aktualizovala své tipy 01.07.2026 22:04Wall Street zahájila druhé pololetí opatrně: Technologie v červeném, trh táhly akcie Meta Platforms 18:08Zlato se výrazně posunulo ke své férové hodnotě. Která neexistuje 16:00Meta plánuje prodej přebytečného výpočetního výkonu. Akcie rostou o 6 %
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Světové akciové indexy v prvním pololetí vesměs rostly, nejvíce jihokorejský, japonský a tchajwanský. Americký index Nasdaq 100 , v němž je mnoho firem z odvětví vyspělých technologií, je od začátku roku výše o 17,9 procenta, širší index S&P 500 přidal 9,6 procenta. Panevropský index STOXX Europe 600 pak od začátku roku vykazuje sedmiprocentní růst, vyplývá z burzovních statistik.
"Americké indexy stále těží z vysokého zastoupení technologií a z investic do infrastruktury pro umělou inteligenci (AI). Ty se promítají nejen do zisků firem, ale i do celého HDP. Zatímco výrobci hardwaru pro datová centra letí, samotným 'hyperscalerům', zejména Meta, Microsoft, se moc nedaří kvůli velkým očekávaným kapitálovým výdajům," řekl ČTK analytik Portu Marek Pokorný.
Evropa podle něj zažila silnější druhé čtvrtletí, než se čekalo. Index Euro Stoxx 50, zaměřený na eurozónu, je od začátku roku vyšší o sedm procent a koncem června uzavřel na rekordu. Rozdíly mezi jednotlivými trhy jsou ale velké. Britský index FTSE 100 vede s růstem o sedm procent, francouzský CAC 40 přidal pět procent, německý DAX ale se dvěma procenty zaostává. Dařilo se čipovým titulům, rostl i průmysl a energetika navázané na infrastrukturu pro AI, jako jsou firmy Siemens, Siemens Energy, ABB a Schneider Electric. Pokorný zmínil také banky, a sice UniCredit, BNP Paribas nebo ING.
Asijské trhy zůstávají absolutní jedničkou roku, tažené polovodičovými ekonomikami. Japonský index Nikkei 225 je od začátku roku výše o 32 procent a dostal se na maximum od roku 1989. Nejlepším velkým trhem světa zůstává Jižní Korea, kde hlavní index KOSPI od začátku roku vzrostl o 77 procent. Táhnou ho výrobci paměťových čipů Samsung Electronics a SK Hynix, jejichž akcie dohromady tvoří polovinu trhu a hlásí rekordní zisky díky zájmu o AI.
Tchajwanský TAIEX je letos výše o 59 procent, motorem je opět polovodičový sektor. Naopak Čína a Indie letos patří mezi trhy, které zaostávají. Čínský index CSI 300 je v plusu dvě procenta, index hongkongské burzy Hang Seng ztrácí šest procent následkem propadem akcií Alibaba a Tencent kvůli obavám o marže z AI investic a slabé domácí spotřebě. Indický index Nifty 50 ztrácí osm procent a řadí se mezi tři nejhorší velké trhy světa. Latinská Amerika pokračuje v solidní výkonnosti. Index MSCI EM Latin America si drží zisk kolem 13 procent a těží z vazby na energetiku, těžbu a další exportní sektory.
Naprostou hvězdou roku jsou stále výrobci pamětí a úložišť. SanDisk letos přidal přes 850 procent, Western Digital 218 procent, Micron Technology 227 procent a Seagate 218 procent. Výrazný růst má za sebou také Intel, Dell, AMD či Applied Materials, upozornil Pokorný.
Podle sektorů se nedaří takzvaným 'hyperscalerům', luxusu či automobilkám, nejlépe na tom není ani obrana a zlato. Společnost Meta Platforms je letos v mínusu šest procent, Microsoft ztrácí 19 procent. Investoři přestali odměňovat vysoké kapitálové výdaje do datových center a zatím je přehodnotili z růstového na nákladový příběh. Index S&P Global Luxury je letos dole o desetinu. Pod tlakem zůstávají také automobilky, a to kvůli slabé poptávce v Číně, tamní konkurenci a celním bariérám.
Do stejné skupiny letos patří i zlato, kde pokles činí sedm procent, a zbrojaři, jako je BAE Systems, Rheinmetall či Palantir. Akcie firmy Rheinmetall minulý týden spadly o 21 procent po zprávě, že Německo zrušilo zakázku na fregaty. Zakázka měla firmě v dalších letech vynést až 15 miliard dolarů, uzavřel Pokorný.
Alexandr Wang says Meta's coming AI has caught up with OpenAI's flagship model By You're currently following this author! Want to unfollow? Unsubscribe via the link in your email.
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Meta's AI chief, Alexandr Wang. Bloomberg/Getty Images Meta is making significant progress in the AI model race, its superintelligence chief Alexandr Wang told employees today.
In an internal town hall, Wang said that Meta's upcoming AI model — which is codenamed Watermelon — has caught up with OpenAI's flagship GPT-5.5 model, he said, according to two sources familiar with the matter. Wang cited the achievement based on closely followed AI model benchmarks. It's not clear which benchmarks Wang cited.
"Watermelon, our next model after Avocado, is currently in training," Wang said in the town hall, according to a person familiar with the matter. "Watermelon uses an order of magnitude more compute than Avocado," he added, referring to Meta's internal codename for Muse Spark, the first in a family of models that the company released in April.
Wang alluded to that progress publicly, too. In a post on X on Thursday, he said an update to the current model Muse Spark is coming soon, with major gains in coding and agentic capabilities aimed at closing the gap with rival models. Asked by a user when Meta would have a coding model on par with Anthropic's Claude Opus, Wang replied that it would be "pretty soon," adding that users would like what the company has "cooking."
Meta's AI ambitions have long hinged on a simple goal: closing the gap with OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. Despite a massive investment in chips, data centers, and talent, the company has struggled to convince developers and customers that its models belong at the industry's leading edge.
If Wang's assessment is accurate, it would mark the clearest sign yet that Meta's investment and Zuckerberg's aggressive talent blitz are beginning to pay off, even as the race continues to move at a rapid pace.
GPT 5.5 is a powerful AI model that OpenAI released in April of this year. OpenAI then debuted its most powerful model yet, GPT 5.6, late last month, but hasn't released it generally yet, based on the US government's requests.
Meta declined to comment. OpenAI didn't respond to a request for comment.
In April, Meta released the first in a series of models called Muse Spark, which performed well on benchmarks but did not match or exceed OpenAI or other labs such as Anthropic.
Zuckerberg is ferociously pushing for Meta to get ahead in the AI race. He appointed Wang last year to head this effort, renaming the company's AI division to Meta Superintelligence Labs.
At Meta, Wang oversees a team of elite AI researchers known as TBD, along with other AI efforts, such as a recent hardware push. Meta has offered top AI talent hundreds of millions of dollars each to join, Business Insider previously reported.
That talent push comes as Meta ramps up spending on infrastructure. The company told investors this year that it expects to spend between $125 billion and $145 billion this year on chips, data centers, and other infrastructure, up from an earlier forecast of $115 billion to $135 billion, citing rising component costs and additional data center spending.
Have a tip? Contact Charles via email at [email protected] or on Signal and WhatsApp at 628-282-2811. Contact Pranav via email at [email protected] or on Signal at 408-905-9124. Use a personal email address, a nonwork WiFi network, and a nonwork device; here's our guide to sharing information securely.
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Charles Rollet You're currently following this author! Want to unfollow? Unsubscribe via the link in your email.
Charles Rollet is BI's tech correspondent in San Francisco. Prior to joining BI, Charles worked at TechCrunch covering startups and VC. Charles is based in the Bay Area, where he enjoys hiking with his dogs. You can contact Charles securely on Signal at charlesrollet.12 or +1-628-282-2811.
Pranav Dixit You're currently following this author! Want to unfollow? Unsubscribe via the link in your email.
Pranav Dixit is the Meta Correspondent at Business Insider based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He writes about Meta’s products, policies, and internal workings while examining how the company’s decisions shape how billions of people connect and communicate.Previously, Pranav was the India-based technology correspondent for BuzzFeed News, covering the impact of Silicon Valley’s largest companies on the culture, society, and politics of more than a billion people in South Asia. He has also been a senior news editor at Engadget and ran technology coverage at the Hindustan Times, one of India’s largest national newspapers.Pranav’s reporting has shed light on the human consequences of Big Tech’s quest for growth in emerging markets, and sparked widespread conversations about the impact of American technology companies on the Global South. In 2019, he won Syracuse University’s Mirror Award for a boots-on-the-ground feature about how WhatsApp misinformation sparked gruesome lynchings in rural India. He has also reported from Kashmir, a volatile geopolitical hotspot, documenting the world’s longest-running internet shutdown.His work has been widely cited by major national and international publications, and he has been featured on the BBC, Al Jazeera, and podcasts such as Vox Media’s Land of the Giants to discuss his work. He has also spoken in journalism classes including at UC Berkeley’s graduate journalism program. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, Vox, Time, The Information, and Al Jazeera.Pranav moved to the United States in 2021 from New Delhi, India, to be a fellow at Harvard University’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism, where he studied the evolution of the American tech press and ways newsrooms around the world can cover technology and society more effectively.Got a tip about Meta or anything else in Silicon Valley? Contact Pranav via encrypted messaging app Signal (+1408-905-9124), or email him at [email protected] or [email protected]. You can also reach him on WhatsApp at +857-753-3949 or DM him on X (@PranavDixit) or BlueSky (@pranavdixit.bsky.social).Pranav keeps sources anonymous. Please use a non-work device to reach out.Expertise: Meta, Facebook, WhatsApp, Llama, AI, Threads, Instagram, Mark Zuckerberg, social media, platforms, immigration
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