Meta Q1 2026 earnings report

Key Points:

• Meta is set to report its first-quarter earnings after the market closes on Wednesday, with analysts expecting earnings per share of $6.79 and revenue of $55.45 billion, driven primarily by a 31% increase in advertising revenue.
• CEO Mark Zuckerberg has intensified Meta’s focus on artificial intelligence, highlighted by a $14.3 billion investment in Scale AI and the appointment of Alexandr Wang as CEO of Meta Superintelligence Labs to compete with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.
• Meta recently launched Muse Spark, its first proprietary AI foundation model, and investors are looking for clearer monetization strategies amid strong growth in its core advertising business.
• The company is heavily investing in data center infrastructure, with expected first-quarter capital expenditures of $27.63 billion and a full-year projection between $115 billion and $135 billion, despite ongoing workforce reductions of about 10% or 8,000 employees.
• Meta’s Reality Labs division continues to operate at a significant loss, with analysts projecting a first-quarter operating loss of $4.82 billion on $488.8 million in revenue, reflecting challenges in the virtual and augmented reality segment.