Meta’s profits were up 36% and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said it is working on “personal superintelligence for all”
In sum – what to know:
– Strong profits, revenues — Meta beat expectations on its Q2 performance, turning in nearly $48 billion in revenue and more than $18 billion in profits.
– Capacity constraints – Like nearly every other hyperscaler, Meta is struggling to bring on as much data center capacity as it wants, as quickly as it would like.
– AI for all – CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted a letter laying out a vision for “personal superintelligence” for everyone, and said that the next five years will be crucial in shaping the relationship between humans and AI.
Meta surged past expectations for its second quarter results, delivering revenues that grew 22% year-over-year to $47.52 billion, and net income of $18.3 billion, a 36% jump from the same time last year.
The company’s expenses, meanwhile, were up 12% from second quarter of 2024 to $27.1 billion. Meta CFO Susan Li told investors on the quarterly call that the company had higher general and administrative costs; higher infrastructure expenses due to opex increases plus depreciation of assets; and higher compensation costs as Meta chases sometimes wildly expensive AI talent.
Meta’s capital expenditures were $17 billion for the quarter. Li said the company is “still somewhat capacity constrained” when it comes to data centers, and the company is working to both increase the efficiency of its workloads and bring more data centers online. “Even with the capacity that we’re bringing online, we are still not quite perfectly meeting the demand that teams have for compute resources across the company. So that is something we’re actively working on,” Li added.
Meta’s strategy for monetizing its investments around AI has five “pillars”: Improved advertising, including enabling businesses to create their own ads with AI; more engaging experiences; business messaging; Meta AI, which the company wants to be the leading personal AI; and AI devices like its Rayban AI glasses.
“We are early in the lifecycle of all of those,” said Li, adding, “We don’t expect that we are going to be realizing significant revenue from any of those things in the near term. … it’s very early.”
Li gave quite a few insights on how Meta is applying AI for business messaging. The first is enabling business AIs within messaging threads, which is being tested in several countries, particularly in emerging markets. Li said that as Meta refines the product, it expects to broaden availability of that option later this year.
“A big emphasis for us here has been optimizing the onboarding process to make our business AIs more of a turnkey solution. So businesses are sort of now able to easily train their AI based on existing information on their website or Facebook and Instagram posts, their WhatsApp profile, product catalogs,” said Li. She continued that Meta is “hearing positive feedback on how AIs are saving businesses time, helping them generate leads, be responsive to customers, offload repetitive tasks from their team like responding to initial inquiries.”
The company is also testing AI use within ads, so that people can do things like ask questions or get assistance within Facebook’s in-app browser, interacting via voice, AI-generated prompts, voice or “quick FAQs,” Li explained. A third area is in using business AIs on business websites as agents that can remember users’ history and preferences; that is being tested now with a few U.S. businesses, she said.
“We’re early in the process. There are certainly challenges in scaling this faster,” Li cautioned. “The most important areas that we are working on to enable broader availability are multi-language support, response quality, and ease of onboarding. That last one is especially important and challenging, but our goal is to build the world’s first turnkey business agent that requires minimal manual upfront implementation and integration and configuration as businesses get set up.”
Meta expects its total expenses for 2025 to be between $114-118 billion, up between 20-24% from the prior year. A few factors are expected to drive expense a higher rate of growth in expenses next year, with infrastructure costs being the largest, followed by employee compensation.
Meta currently expects 2025 capex to be between $66-72 billion, up about $30 billion year-over-year at the midpoint of the guidance range. According to Li’s commentary on the company’s outlook: “While the infrastructure planning process remains highly dynamic, we currently expect another year of similarly significant capital expenditures dollar growth in 2026 as we continue aggressively pursuing opportunities to bring additional capacity online to meet the needs of our artificial intelligence efforts and business operations.”
Meta will pursue ‘personal superintelligence’ for all
In some commentary on the quarterly call as well as a public letter, CEO Mark Zuckerberg laid out Meta’s perspective on the evolution of AI, and what AI will mean for humanity.
“Over the last few months we have begun to see glimpses of our AI systems improving themselves,” he wrote. “The improvement is slow for now, but undeniable. Developing superintelligence is now in sight.”
“Meta’s vision,” he continued, “is to bring personal superintelligence to everyone. We believe in putting this power in people’s hands to direct it towards what they value in their own lives.
“This is distinct from others in the industry who believe superintelligence should be directed centrally towards automating all valuable work, and then humanity will live on a dole of its output,” Zuckerberg added. He went on to write: “At Meta, we believe that people pursuing their individual aspirations is how we have always made progress expanding prosperity, science, health, and culture. This will be increasingly important in the future as well. … The intersection of technology and how people live is Meta’s focus, and this will only become more important in the future.”
He concluded that the next five years will be crucial to shaping the role of humans and AI. “The rest of this decade seems likely to be the decisive period for determining the path this technology will take, and whether superintelligence will be a tool for personal empowerment or a force focused on replacing large swaths of society,” Zuckerberg wrote.
Read his full letter here.
