Mark Zuckerberg has never been one to shy away from a rebrand. Much like the drastic shifts the Meta CEO frequently takes to his personal style, his company has undergone a series of identity overhauls throughout the years. In 2021, it shed its Facebook moniker to become known as Meta. Two years later, Zuckerberg cut 10,000 jobs across his company after declaring 2023 Meta’s “Year of Efficiency.”
As for 2025? It’s all about A.I. The social media giant is looking to increase its A.I. investments this year by up to 66 percent, the company said in its quarterly earnings report yesterday (Jan. 29). “This year is going to set the course for the future. This is going to be intense,” Zuckerberg told analysts on an earnings call yesterday.
Meta’s capital expenditure in 2024 totaled more than $39 billion, nearly $15 billion of which was spent between October and December, according to yesterday’s earnings report. This year, that figure is set to jump to between $60 billion and $65 billion. This growth “will be driven by increased investment to support our generative A.I. efforts and core business,” the company said.
Building out data centers and GPU stockpile
Much of Meta’s A.I. investment will be dedicated to building out A.I. infrastructure, such as data centers and GPUs. In December, Zuckerberg unveiled plans to build Meta’s largest data center yet. Located in Richland Parish, La., it will span 4 million square feet—an area “so big that it’ll cover a significant part of Manhattan,” said Zuckerberg on yesterday’s earnings call. The company is looking to more than double its stockpile of GPUs from 600,000 to 1.3 million by the end of 2025.
Zuckerberg is hopeful these A.I. investments will give Meta an edge as it continues to push A.I. features like Meta AI, a virtual assistant that had nearly 600 million monthly active users by the end of 2024. In 12 months’ time, this figure should reach the 1 billion mark, according to the CEO, who also recently proclaimed that upcoming releases of Llama, Meta’s open-source large language model, will make it “the leading state-of-the-art model.”
Building a coding A.I. agent
Meta’s 2025 goals also include building an A.I. agent with coding capabilities on par with mid-level engineer to aid the company’s research and development efforts. “This is going to be a profound milestone, and potentially one of the most important innovations in history,” Zuckerberg told analysts. “Whichever company builds this first is going to have meaningful advantage in deploying it,” said the CEO, adding that such an agent will shape the field of A.I. research.
Meta ended 2024 with some 74,000 staffers, a 10 percent jump year-over-year. The next 12 months will see the company ramp up its hires as it grows its A.I. teams “significantly,” according to Zuckerberg’s recent Facebook post.
Meta expects its full-year expense in 2025 to total $114 billion to $119 billion. The largest category will be infrastructure, followed by employee compensation.
In the past quarter, Meta’s revenue totaled at $48 billion, up 21 percent from the year prior. Full-year revenue came at $164 billion, up 22 percent from 2023. Quarterly net income jumped 49 percent to nearly $21 billion, and full-year net income climbed 59 percent to $62 billion.
