Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg speaks at the Meta Connect event at Meta headquarters in Menlo Park, California on September 27, 2023.
Josh Adelson | AFP | Getty Images
Yuan Second-quarter earnings will be released after the market close on Wednesday. The result is as follows:
income: $5.16 per share. This may not compare to the $4.73 per share expected by LSEG
income: $39.07 billion. This may not compare to the $38.31 billion expected by LSEG
Wall Street expects sales to rise 20% from $32 billion a year ago as Meta’s business continues to recover from a brutal 2022, when economic difficulties caused advertisers to cut spending. Meta’s advertising revenue is expected to grow 19% to $37.6 billion, according to StreetAccount.
While the company’s core advertising unit has been the main driver of the stock, investors have become increasingly concerned about Meta’s massive spending on artificial intelligence and virtual universes. Meta, like other tech giants, has been investing in data center infrastructure and computing resources to train artificial intelligence models and run large workloads.
Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged last week that Meta and its peers may be overspending on artificial intelligence, but said they had no choice if they wanted to prepare for future growth.
“The disadvantage of falling behind is that you won’t be able to master the most important technologies in the next 10 to 15 years,” Zuckerberg said at a conference. podcast Bloomberg’s Emily Chang echoed similar comments letter CEO Sundar Pichai said on the company’s earnings call last week.
In April, Meta said its 2024 capital expenditures would be between $35 billion and $40 billion, up from the company’s previous forecast of $30 billion to $37 billion.
Earlier this year, Zuckerberg said that by the end of 2024, Meta’s computing infrastructure will include 350,000 Nvidia H100 graphics cards, expensive computer chips used to train so-called large language models and related artificial intelligence software. Zuckerberg said at the time that Meta’s computing infrastructure would include “the equivalent of nearly 600,000 H100 computations if other GPUs are included,” which amounted to billions of dollars in spending.
Regarding Google’s investments in artificial intelligence, Pichai told analysts last week, “When we go through a curve like this, the risk of underinvesting is much greater than the risk of us overinvesting.”
As part of Meta’s push to advance artificial intelligence, the company last week launched the latest version of its Llama AI model, which consists of three different variants that developers can access and use for free, highlighting Meta’s efforts to ensure that its artificial intelligence technology is consistent with A consistent effort by OpenAI.
Judging from Meta’s report on Wednesday, the digital advertising market has shown some signs of weakness. Alphabet reported lower-than-expected YouTube ad revenue last week and Tuesday interest The stock plunged 15% after the bell after issuing disappointing third-quarter guidance.
Pinterest Finance Chief Julia Brau Donnelly told analysts on an earnings call that while technology, autos and financial services were the “powerful source” of the company’s advertising business, growth in those areas was “partly offset by weakness among food and beverage advertisers.” Offset,” they are dealing with broader headwinds in the category. “
Meta’s Reality Labs division, responsible for its Metaverse technology, is still losing money. Analysts expect the unit to post an operating loss of $4.55 billion, according to StreetAccount. That would bring its total losses since the end of 2020 to about $50 billion. The division’s revenue is expected to grow 34% from the same period last year to $371 million, mainly from Quest VR headsets and smart glasses.
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