Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has unveiled the company’s plan to invest in artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure. On Meta's first-quarter call, he said the company would spend 'hundreds of billions of dollars' on AI advancements. Although the market has been concerned about Chinese AI firm DeepSeek's rapid growth, Meta is continuing its investment in AI.
Zuckerberg also pointed out that Meta’s capital expenditures will be more than $60 billion in 2025, mainly driven by data center expansion. This strategic advantage will drive high service quality and scalability, he said. While he acknowledged DeepSeek’s technological advancements, he said that demand for AI chips is still important for inference purposes.
Llama 4, the next generation of the Meta AI model, is still being built. Zuckerberg detailed that one of the aims of Llama 3 was to make open-source AI as good as proprietary models, while Llama 4 wanted to establish Meta as a leader in AI. He said Llama 4 would offer agentic and multimodal capability, making it a competitor to other leading AI models.
In addition, he forecasted that 2025 would be an important moment in AI, with the possibility of engineering agents that could code and solve problems comparable to those of midsize software engineers. Zuckerberg suggests that the company with the most advanced AI engineering agent will have a massive lead in AI research and the commercialization of AI. Meta also expects its AI assistant Meta AI to reach over one billion users this year, as it emphasizes personal AI experiences based on specific individual preferences and cultural contexts.
The fourth quarter of 2024 was also a strong financial quarter for Meta, with revenue totaling $48.4 billion—up 21% year-over-year. Net income surged 49% to $20.8 billion. Daily active users for the company’s family of apps, such as Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, also increased 5% to 3.35 billion.
Meta’s Reality Labs unit reported an operating loss of $4.97 billion in the quarter. The loss only rose slightly from the $4.7 billion loss in the same period last year. Yet Reality Labs posted a $1.1 billion revenue, powered by Ray Ban Meta smart glasses and Quest VR headset sales.