Meta delivered exceptional financial performance in the fourth quarter of 2024, surpassing market expectations with record-breaking revenue and profit figures. The company demonstrated robust growth across key metrics while announcing ambitious AI investment plans for 2025.
Financial Highlights
The social media giant reported Q4 revenue of $48.39 billion, marking a 21% increase year-over-year and exceeding analyst expectations of $46.99 billion. Net income rose significantly by 49% to $20.84 billion, resulting in earnings per share of $8.02, well above the predicted $6.76.
Meta's operating margin improved to 48%, representing a 7 percentage point increase from the previous year. Ad impressions also showed positive momentum with a 6% growth compared to the same period last year.
User Growth and Engagement
Meta's family of apps, including Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, continued to expand their user base. The company reported 3.35 billion daily active users across its platforms in December 2024, up from 3.29 billion in the previous quarter, demonstrating a 5% year-over-year increase.
Future Outlook and AI Investment
Looking ahead to 2025, Meta announced significant capital expenditure plans ranging from $60-65 billion, representing a substantial increase of 53% to 66% compared to 2024's $39.23 billion. This investment will primarily focus on AI data center development.
For the first quarter of 2025, Meta projects revenue between $39.5-41.8 billion, indicating an anticipated growth of 8-15% year-over-year. The company expects its core business investments to drive continued strong revenue growth throughout 2025.
AI Infrastructure Development
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg outlined plans for a massive 2-gigawatt+ data center project, with aims to achieve 1GW of capacity online in 2025. The facility is expected to house more than 1.3 million GPUs by year-end, marking a significant step in Meta's AI infrastructure expansion.
However, the company faces new challenges in the AI space, particularly from Chinese competitor DeepSeek, which recently claimed to achieve comparable AI results at less than 10% of Meta's Llama model training costs.
