Meta Q3 Revenue Hits Record $40.6 Billion, Expects ‘Significant’ Increase in Capital Spending in 2025

Meta, the most massive social media company on the planet, keeps growing bigger.

The parent company of Facebook and Instagram reported Q3 2024 revenue of $40.58 billion, a quarterly record, up a healthy 19% year over year. Net income was $15.69 billion, an increase of 35%, translating to $6.03 per share. That was well above Wall Street forecasts of $40.29 billion in revenue and earnings per share of $5.25, per LSEG.

For September 2024, the number of daily active users across Meta’s family of apps averaged 3.29 billion, up 5% year over year and an increase over 3.27 billion in June. (As of Q1 2024, Meta no longer reports average monthly users for its family of apps, or daily or monthly user figures for the flagship Facebook app.)

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“We had a good quarter driven by AI progress across our apps and business,” Meta co-founder, CEO and chairman Mark Zuckerberg said in prepared remarks.

Meta expects fourth quarter 2024 total revenue to be in the range of $45 billion-$48 billion, in line with analyst expectations. It projected full-year 2024 capital expenditures to be in the range of $38 billion-$40 billion (updated from the prior range of $37 billion-$40 billion) and said in announcing earnings, “We continue to expect significant capital expenditures growth in 2025.” Specifically, Meta is dramatically boosting its investment in artificial intelligence, which has become a Silicon Valley arms race.

Earlier this month, the company unveiled Meta Movie Gen, a suite of AI models that can use text inputs to produce realistic-looking videos as well as edit existing videos. Movie Gen will be “coming to Instagram” in 2025, according to Zuckerberg. Meta announced a pact with horror studio Blumhouse and select creators as part of a program to test and provide feedback on Movie Gen.

For Q3, Meta’s Reality Labs business, which includes the Quest AR/VR headset and metaverse initiatives, posted sales of $270 million (up from $210 million the year prior) and an operating loss of $4.43 billion (versus a loss of $3.74 billion a year earlier) — underscoring the company’s expectations that it will be years before the investment pays off.

In September, Meta took the wraps off the prototype of augmented-reality glasses Orion (previously codenamed Project Nazare), with the company claiming them to be “the most advanced pair of AR glasses ever made.” Meta described it as “a product combining the convenience and immediacy of wearables with a large display, high-bandwidth input and contextualized AI in a form that people feel comfortable wearing in their daily lives.” Initially, it is providing Meta employees and “select external audiences” access to Orion before the launch of its consumer-focused AR glasses product line.