Meta Is Making More Money: Meta Platforms Inc. reports strong first-quarter results, surpassing expectations with significant earnings growth, but the stock slipped in after-hours trading
Meta Platforms Inc. reported strong first-quarter results, surpassing expectations with significant earnings growth. The company earned $26.77 billion, or $10.44 per share, in the January-March period, up about 61% from $16.64 billion, or $6.43 per share, in the same period a year earlier. Revenue rose 33% from last year to $56.31 billion.
Meta’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, stated that the company is on track to deliver personal superintelligence to billions of people. The company also updated its projected capital expenditures for the year to be in the range of $125 billion to $145 billion, reflecting expectations of higher component pricing and additional data center costs.
On paper, Meta had a quarter that most companies would kill for. Profits up 61%. Revenue up 33%. Three and a half billion people using its apps every single day. By almost any traditional measure, the numbers were outstanding.
And yet, when trading ended Wednesday, Meta’s stock was down more than 6%.
Welcome to the strange, high-stakes world of Big Tech in the AI era — where beating expectations isn’t enough if you’re also telling investors you plan to spend even more than you already said you would.
The Numbers First
Meta earned $26.77 billion in the first quarter of 2026, or $10.44 per share — a 61% jump from the same period last year. Revenue came in at $56.31 billion, up 33% and comfortably ahead of what analysts had pencilled in. For guidance, the company projected second-quarter revenue of $58 billion to $61 billion, roughly in line with expectations.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg, never one for understatement, called it “a milestone quarter” and declared that Meta is “on track to deliver personal superintelligence to billions of people.” It’s the kind of sentence that would have sounded like science fiction a decade ago and now barely raises an eyebrow in a quarterly earnings statement.
The Bill Is Getting Bigger
Here’s where investors got uncomfortable.
Meta quietly raised its projected capital expenditure for the year — again. The new range is $125 billion to $145 billion, up from the already eye-watering $115 billion to $135 billion announced just months ago. The company attributed the increase to higher component pricing and additional data centre costs, the physical infrastructure needed to power its rapidly expanding AI ambitions.
To put that in perspective: Meta is planning to spend more this year on building AI infrastructure than the entire GDP of many mid-sized countries.
“Investments in data centers are part of a massive gamble by Big Tech firms to win the AI race,” said J.P. Gownder, a principal analyst at Forrester. “But the risks associated with alienating the top-tier human workforce that took years to build too often goes unnoticed.”
That last point stings a little, because at the same time Meta is ramping up spending on AI infrastructure and highly paid AI specialists, it is laying off roughly 10% of its workforce — around 8,000 people. The company ended March with nearly 78,000 employees, barely 1% more than a year ago, even as its revenues and ambitions have grown enormously.
3.5 Billion People — and Counting (Mostly)
One number that deserves a moment of pause: 3.56 billion people used at least one Meta app — Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, or Threads — on a daily basis in March. That’s nearly half the planet, checking in every single day.
That figure did dip slightly from December, though Meta was quick to explain why: internet disruptions in Iran and restricted access to WhatsApp in Russia trimmed the numbers at the margins. Structural decline, the company insists, it is not.
What Meta has built — a daily habit for almost half of humanity — remains one of the most remarkable achievements in the history of media. And AI, Zuckerberg argues, will only deepen that engagement, making its apps smarter, more personal, and harder to put down.
“AI Won’t Replace You.” Sure, Mark.
On the post-earnings call, Zuckerberg addressed the fear that sits quietly in the back of many workers’ minds these days — the worry that AI is coming for their jobs.
“I think AI is going to amplify people’s ability to do what you want,” he said, “whether that’s to improve your health, your learning, your relationships, your ability to achieve your personal career goals and more.”
It’s a reassuring message. It’s also worth noting that it was delivered by a man who, in the same quarter, laid off 8,000 employees while dramatically increasing spending on the very technology he says won’t replace humans.
Storm Clouds on the Horizon
CFO Susan Li used the earnings call to flag something that rarely gets the attention it deserves: the growing legal and regulatory exposure building around Meta on both sides of the Atlantic.
The company is watching “headwinds in the EU and the US” that could meaningfully affect its business, Li said, citing increased scrutiny around what she carefully described as “youth-related issues.” A Los Angeles jury recently found Meta liable for harms suffered by a young woman who began using its platforms as a child — a landmark verdict that may be just the first in a long line of similar cases. More trials are scheduled, and Li acknowledged they “may ultimately result in a material loss.”
It’s a quiet but significant admission — that beneath the record profits and the superintelligence ambitions, there are real and growing questions about the cost of building platforms that billions of people, including children, find impossible to leave.
Meta’s quarter was, by any conventional measure, a triumph. The business is strong, the growth is real, and the AI bet is being made with genuine conviction and extraordinary resources.
But the stock market’s reaction told a different story — one about the limits of patience, the anxiety around ever-expanding spending, and the uneasy feeling that somewhere between the billions being poured into data centres and the billions being made from advertising, some important questions are still waiting to be answered.