Meta reported mixed financial results for the third quarter of 2025. The company brought in record quarterly revenue but reported a major tax bill that dampened earnings per share, the company announced on Wednesday. The financial results come as Meta ends a multibillion-dollar hiring spree focused on artificial intelligence talent.
The tech giant earned $51.24bn in quarterly revenue, beating Wall Street’s expectations and the company’s own projections for third-quarter sales. However, it reported earnings per share (EPS) of $1.05, far below Wall Street expectations of $6.70 in EPS. The major drop was due to a one-time non-cash income tax charge of $15.93bn. The EPS would have been $7.25 without this one-time charge, the company said.
The report, and the scheduled investor call, gives investors another opportunity to find out whether the company’s lavish spending on AI infrastructure is justified. The company projected full-year total expenses would be between $116 to $118bn, upping the lower end of the range from $114bn. The company also expects 2025 capital expenditures to be between $70 and $72bn, up from a previously projected range of $66 and $72bn. Meta said its fourth-quarter revenue would likely fall somewhere between $56 and $59bn.
“We had a strong quarter for our business and our community,” said Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s founder and CEO. “Meta Superintelligence Labs is off to a great start and we continue to lead the industry in AI glasses. If we deliver even a fraction of the opportunity ahead, then the next few years will be the most exciting period in our history.”
Jesse Cohen, senior analyst at Investing.com, said the latest report reveals “the growing tension between the company’s massive AI infrastructure investments and investor expectations for near-term returns”.
Spending is not expected to slow down any time soon, however. On the earnings call, Susan Li, the company’s chief financial officer, said Meta will need to “invest aggressively” in 2026 to meet the company’s computational needs. Earlier this month, the company announced a new joint venture with Blue Owl Capital that would help the firms build and finance the new $27bn Hyperion data center campus in Louisiana, the biggest Meta is involved in developing.
“We also anticipate total expenses will grow at a significantly faster percentage rate in 2026 than 2025, with growth driven primarily by infrastructure costs, including incremental cloud expenses and depreciation,” Li said. “Employee compensation costs will be the second largest contributor to growth, as we recognize a full year of compensation for employees hired throughout 2025, particularly AI talent, and add technical talent in priority areas.”
When asked about how the company is balancing releasing products that will show near-term returns on investment with these larger research-focused projects, Zuckerberg that Meta AI is a “massive latent opportunity” and pointed to the company’s ability to bring its new products to billions of users.
“The research is going to enable technological capabilities to exist and then those capabilities can get built into all kinds of different products,” Zuckerberg said.
It’s the first financial update since Meta said it planned to lay off 600 staffers from its AI unit – the same unit the company went on a spending and hiring spree to restructure and fill with the top AI talent from other companies. The company said the layoffs were an effort to reduce the bloat within the company’s “super-intelligence” unit and brought the number of employees there down to just under 3,000.
Zuckerberg said the investment into Meta’s Superintelligence Labs helped the company build what he described as “the highest talent density lab in the industry at this point”.
The company’s stock has been on a steady rise over the past six months. Its previous two earnings reports have beaten Wall Street expectations. The wider US stock market likewise reached record highs the week.
Meta also launched its new Ray-Ban Display glasses last month, which feature a screen embedded in the lenses, and analysts were eager to hear sales figures. But the unit responsible for these glasses as well as Meta’s virtual reality headsets posted a massive $4.4bn loss. Zuckerberg said the company’s collaborations with Ray-Ban and Oakleys on these AI glasses were going well and that these investments will likely be very profitable. Meta’s original camera glasses, simply dubbed Meta Ray-Bans, proved to be a popular gadget. Both types of glasses have already prompted privacy concerns. While Meta has designed the glasses not to work if a light that notifies people that the glasses are recording is covered, a $60 modification can disable the light, 404 Media reported.
“I suspect these glasses, in particular, will predominantly appeal to early ‘tech-curious’ adopters, and that scheduled demos will far outpace sales,” said Mike Proulx, Forrester VP, research director.
On the advertising side, Meta lost its accreditation from the Media Rating Council, a non-profit that sets industry wide standards for brand safety, after the company decided to pull out of the organization’s annual audits. The accreditation signals to advertisers that the content on the platform that their ads may appear next to would not be harmful to their brand. Meta received the accreditation just four months before it was stripped.
Analysts were optimistic that the loss of accreditation would not ultimately hurt Meta’s ability to attract advertisers.
“While this may raise eyebrows among advertisers, it won’t deter them from investing in Meta due to its sheer audience reach and brand reliance,” Proulx said. “Brands will overlook potential brand safety risks as long as their Meta media investments continue to perform.”
