Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Meta Platforms Inc., wears a pair of Meta Oakley Vanguard AI glasses during the Meta Connect event in Menlo Park, California, US, on Wednesday, Sept. 17, 2025.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Meta on Wednesday will report fourth-quarter earnings, and investors will be looking for any signs that its revamped artificial intelligence strategy will benefit the company in 2026.
Here’s what analysts polled by LSEG are expecting:
- Earnings per share: $8.21 estimated
- Revenue: $58.35 billion estimated
Meta spent a large chunk of 2025 overhauling its AI unit, including investing $14.3 billion in Scale AI to land the startup’s founder, Alexandr Wang, and several of his colleagues.
Wang oversees Meta’s top-tier TBD unit that is tasked with developing powerful AI models. The company set up TBD after its Llama 4 model launched to tepid response from developers last spring. Meta has been testing a new frontier model and Llama successor code-named Avocado, and plans to release it during the first half of the year, CNBC reported.
Underpinning Meta’s AI efforts has been a major data center build-out while rivals like OpenAI and Alphabet do the same. Meta on Tuesday said it committed to paying glass manufacturing giant Corning up to $6 billion through 2030 for fiber-optic cable in its AI data centers.
Although investors have been spooked by Meta’s costly artificial intelligence investments, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has characterized the moves as necessary given AI’s rapid pace of development.
“Being able to make a significantly larger investment here is very likely to be a profitable thing over, over some period,” Zuckerberg told analysts in October.
Meta’s capital expenditures, related to its data center push, are projected to come in at $21.97 billion for the quarter, according to StreetAccount.
The company is expected to report $56.98 billion in online advertising sales for the fourth quarter, according to StreetAccount.
Wall Street expects fourth-quarter daily active people to come in at 3.58 billion.
Investors will also be monitoring what Zuckerberg has to say about the company’s Reality Labs unit, which builds the virtual reality, augmented reality and wearable technology intended to power the so-called metaverse.
Earlier this month, Meta laid off more than 1,000 Reality Labs employees who worked on VR-related initiatives, including internal studios, as part of a shifting of resources to AI and related wearable devices, like the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses.
Although Meta tech chief Andrew Bosworth told media outlets last week that Meta is not halting its VR efforts, the company’s outsized impact on that industry has chilled some developers and sparked fears of a VR winter, CNBC reported.
Analysts estimate Reality Labs to post a fourth-quarter operating loss of $5.67 billion on $940.8 million in sales. That unit has had over $70 billion in total operating losses since late 2020.
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