Digital ad market shows signs of sharp rebound as Meta, Amazon point to growth
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A year ago, Meta finance chief Susan Li offered chilling commentary about the state of the digital ad market, telling analysts that the struggling industry would remain in a slump.
Speaking to analysts on the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call, Li said at the time that Facebook’s revenue “remained under pressure from weak advertising demand” and that sales would continue “to be impacted by the uncertain and volatile macroeconomic landscape.”
During that period Meta’s ad revenue fell 4%, and Google’s ad business suffered a similar drop. Inflation, supply chain issues and global conflict were all depressing spending.
The narrative is very different now.
With results in from Alphabet, Meta and Amazon — the three U.S. leaders in digital advertising — it’s clear that the market has rebounded, at least for the time being.
Meta’s fourth-quarter ad sales jumped 24% from a year earlier to $38.7 billion, while Amazon’s booming ad unit rose 27% to $14.7 billion. Meanwhile Alphabet, still the market leader, saw its Google ad business rise 11% to $65.5 billion, boosted by 16% growth at YouTube.
Debra Aho Williamson, principal analyst at Insider Intelligence, told CNBC that big advertiser events like the Summer Olympics in Paris and the upcoming presidential elections will contribute to higher spending. Insider Intelligence said in a recent report that global ad spending will jump 10% in 2024, up from growth of 6.3% in 2023 and the same level of expansion the prior year.
“After two years of relative malaise, the outlook is very positive on a global scale and in every major region,” the report said.
Analysts at William Blair expressed similar sentiment. They said businesses appear less concerned with the Russia-Ukraine conflict than in the past and are seeing a potentially more favorable interest rate outlook.
“The current macroeconomic environment is continuing to improve for digital advertising,” they wrote, adding that investments by Meta and Alphabet into artificial intelligence to improve their ad platforms are paying off.
Investors will get additional data on the digital ad market when Snap and Pinterest report earnings this week. Those numbers could look quite different, Williamson said, because they’re “much smaller companies that have struggled to build substantial ad businesses, and in this environment, the big are getting bigger.”
On the whole, “digital advertising is continuing to eat up share” of worldwide advertising, Williamson said.
Whether the big players can maintain the momentum is a question that will persist for the coming quarters. One reason growth looks so strong now is because the numbers are being compared to the year-ago period, when conditions were bleak.
Another bump is coming from China-based advertisers, which are spending heavily to reach users across the globe. Meta said that sales from China represented 10% of revenue last year, and accounted for 5 percentage points of growth. Analysts have said online retailers Temu and Shein are the biggest contributors to Meta’s China business, and have raised concerns that such spending may not last.
Regarding Meta’s China business, Li told analysts last week that “the level of growth in 2023 will probably be hard to replicate, but we’ll just keep watching this and see how it plays out.”
Analysts at Bank of America Global Research warned in a note on Friday that investors shouldn’t look past the conflict in the Red Sea, which is causing supply chain bottlenecks and could lead ecommerce companies to reduce their ad spending.
“We think exposure for Alphabet & Meta is very modest,” they wrote.
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The letters AI, which stands for “artificial intelligence,” stand at the Amazon Web Services booth at the Hannover Messe industrial trade fair in Hannover, Germany, on March 31, 2025.
Julian Stratenschulte | Picture Alliance | Getty Images
Amazon said Wednesday that its cloud division has developed hardware to cool down next-generation Nvidia graphics processing units that are used for artificial intelligence workloads.
Nvidia’s GPUs, which have powered the generative AI boom, require massive amounts of energy. That means companies using the processors need additional equipment to cool them down.
Amazon considered erecting data centers that could accommodate widespread liquid cooling to make the most of these power-hungry Nvidia GPUs. But that process would have taken too long, and commercially available equipment wouldn’t have worked, Dave Brown, vice president of compute and machine learning services at Amazon Web Services, said in a video posted to YouTube.
“They would take up too much data center floor space or increase water usage substantially,” Brown said. “And while some of these solutions could work for lower volumes at other providers, they simply wouldn’t be enough liquid-cooling capacity to support our scale.”
Rather, Amazon engineers conceived of the In-Row Heat Exchanger, or IRHX, that can be plugged into existing and new data centers. More traditional air cooling was sufficient for previous generations of Nvidia chips.
Customers can now access the AWS service as computing instances that go by the name P6e, Brown wrote in a blog post. The new systems accompany Nvidia’s design for dense computing power. Nvidia’s GB200 NVL72 packs a single rack with 72 Nvidia Blackwell GPUs that are wired together to train and run large AI models.
Computing clusters based on Nvidia’s GB200 NVL72 have previously been available through Microsoft or CoreWeave. AWS is the world’s largest supplier of cloud infrastructure.
Amazon has rolled out its own infrastructure hardware in the past. The company has custom chips for general-purpose computing and for AI, and designed its own storage servers and networking routers. In running homegrown hardware, Amazon depends less on third-party suppliers, which can benefit the company’s bottom line. In the first quarter, AWS delivered the widest operating margin since at least 2014, and the unit is responsible for most of Amazon’s net income.
Microsoft, the second largest cloud provider, has followed Amazon’s lead and made strides in chip development. In 2023, the company designed its own systems called Sidekicks to cool the Maia AI chips it developed.
WATCH: AWS announces latest CPU chip, will deliver record networking speed
The logo of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin can be seen on a coin in front of a Bitcoin chart.
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Bitcoin hit a fresh record on Wednesday afternoon as an Nvidia-led rally in equities helped push the price of the cryptocurrency higher into the stock market close.
The price of bitcoin was last up 1.9%, trading at $110,947.49, according to Coin Metrics. Just before 4:00 p.m. ET, it hit a high of $112,052.24, surpassing its May 22 record of $111,999.
The flagship cryptocurrency has been trading in a tight range for several weeks despite billions of dollars flowing into bitcoin exchange traded funds. Bitcoin purchases by public companies outpaced ETF inflows in the second quarter. Still, bitcoin is up just 2% in the past month.
Bitcoin climbs above $112,000
On Wednesday, tech stocks rallied as Nvidia became the first company to briefly touch $4 trillion in market capitalization. In the same session, investors appeared to shrug off the latest tariff developments from President Donald Trump. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite notched a record close.
While institutions broadly have embraced bitcoin’s “digital gold” narrative, it is still a risk asset that rises and falls alongside stocks depending on what’s driving investor sentiment. When the market is in risk-on mode and investors buy growth-oriented assets like tech stocks, bitcoin and crypto tend to rally with them.
Investors have been expecting bitcoin to reach new records in the second half of the year as corporate treasuries accelerate their bitcoin buying sprees and Congress gets closer to passing crypto legislation.
Dado Ruvic | Reuters
Perplexity AI on Wednesday launched a new artificial intelligence-powered web browser called Comet in the startup’s latest effort to compete in the consumer internet market against companies like Google and Microsoft.
Comet will allow users to connect with enterprise applications like Slack and ask complex questions via voice and text, according to a brief demo video Perplexity released on Wednesday.
The browser is available to Perplexity Max subscribers, and the company said invite-only access will roll out to a waitlist over the summer. Perplexity Max costs users $200 per month.
“We built Comet to let the internet do what it has been begging to do: to amplify our intelligence,” Perplexity wrote in a blog post on Wednesday.
Perplexity is best known for its AI-powered search engine that gives users simple answers to questions and links out to the original source material on the web. After the company was accused of plagiarizing content from media outlets, it launched a revenue-sharing model with publishers last year.
In May, Perplexity was in late-stage talks to raise $500 million at a $14 billion valuation, a source familiar confirmed to CNBC. The startup was also approached by Meta earlier this year about a potential acquisition, but the companies did not finalize a deal.
“We will continue to launch new features and functionality for Comet, improve experiences based on your feedback, and focus relentlessly–as we always have–on building accurate and trustworthy AI that fuels human curiosity,” Perplexity said Wednesday.
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