Meta Platforms doesn’t sell artificial-intelligence services or data-center capacity, but it might be reaping some of the richest benefits from the AI boom so far.
The company nearly doubled its capital spending, from $39 billion in 2024 to $72 billion in 2025. A staggering level of up to $135 billion is projected for this year—a total that would be bigger than the gross domestic product of many small nations.
After Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg teased in October the company’s aggressive plans to spend on new data centers, investors punished the stock, sending shares down around 7% in after-hours trading. But since Meta revealed its latest capital-expenditure guidance Wednesday in its fourth-quarter earnings release, they have been rewarding Meta, with shares climbing 10% on Thursday.
Why? Because Meta also offered evidence that AI is helping its advertising-business boom like never before.
“I think what we’re seeing is sort of a sustainable trend that’s largely grounded in some of the AI investments that they’ve made,” said Benjamin Black, an internet analyst at Deutsche Bank.
Meta’s revenue grew 22% year over year in 2025 to $201 billion, and the company expects even bigger gains in the current quarter, potentially as high as 34%.
That is huge growth for a company that brought in nearly $60 billion in the latest three-month period. And Zuckerberg signaled that Meta was just scratching the surface of AI’s potential.
“Our world-class recommendation systems are already driving meaningful growth across our apps and ads business. But we think that the current systems are primitive compared to what will be possible soon,” he said on a call with investors and analysts.
Nearly all of Meta’s revenue comes from its ad business. In the period ended in December, the figure was 97%. The company has said it is still capacity-constrained, meaning it doesn’t have enough resources and infrastructure at the moment to do everything it wants to do with AI—hence the data-center build-out.
“Demands for compute resources across the company have increased even faster than our supply,” Meta’s Chief Financial Officer Susan Li said. “We expect over the course of 2026 to have significantly more capacity this year as we add cloud. But we’ll likely still be constrained through much of 2026 until additional capacity from our own facilities comes online later in the year.”
Li said the company doubled the number of graphics-processing units that it used to train its ad-ranking model in the fourth quarter and adopted a new learning architecture.
Those actions led users to click on ads on Facebook 3.5% more often and to a gain of more than 1% in conversions, meaning purchases, subscriptions or leads, on Instagram, she said. Other AI-related improvements led to a 3% increase in conversions across its family of apps.
On the ad-buying side, Meta has also been working toward using AI to automate ad creation for businesses that want to advertise their products or services on Facebook and Instagram. On the call, Li said the combined revenue run rate of video-generation tools hit $10 billion in the fourth quarter.
“The more compute the ad platform gets, the far better it performs, and that’s a real structural advantage that Meta has,” said Black, the internet analyst. “If you can see that yesterday’s spend is driving this month’s growth, then as a good business person, you’re going to continue to feed the beast.”
Write to Meghan Bobrowsky at meghan.bobrowsky@wsj.com