Meta set to report Q3 earnings after the bell
Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Meta Platforms Inc., arrives for the Meta Connect event in Menlo Park, California, US, on Wednesday, Sept. 25, 2024.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Meta is slated to report third-quarter earnings on Wednesday after the close of regular trading.
Here’s what analysts polled by LSEG are expecting:
- Earnings per share: $5.25
- Revenue: $40.29 billion
Meta shares are up almost 70% this year and trading near a record, boosted by a string of strong earnings reports. The company’s gains on Wall Street have benefited Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who earlier in October surpassed Amazon founder Jeff Bezos as the world’s second-richest person for the first time, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Zuckerberg has been pointing to Meta’s massive investments into artificial intelligence, which includes spending billions of dollars on Nvidia’s popular graphics processing units, as helping improve the company’s core online ad business in the aftermath of Apple’s 2021 iOS privacy update.
With Meta in July reporting its fourth straight quarter of sales growth above 20%, investors remain optimistic about the company’s overall financial health. Bernstein analysts said in a research note last week that Meta replaced Alphabet as the firm’s “set-it-and-forget-it blue chip holding” because of the company’s “healthy core business” and its low-risk AI strategy.
Meta’s results come a day after digital ad companies Alphabet, Reddit and Snap all reported solid quarterly earnings. Microsoft reports after the bell on Wednesday, and the big week for tech earnings wraps up on Thursday, when Apple and Amazon report quarterly financials.
One possible concern for Meta could be slowing revenue growth.
If Meta hits analysts’ expectations for third-quarter revenue, that would represent 18% year-over-year growth, down from 23% a year ago. At that time, Meta was heavily benefiting from the massive digital ad spending from China-linked retailers like Temu and Shein, and it’s unclear how long those companies will continue their digital marketing blitzes.
In February, Meta reported fourth-quarter revenue that was up 25% year-over-year, and in April, the company’s first-quarter revenue was up 27% from a year earlier. Besting those marks will be a “tough bar” for the company, said Angelo Zino, vice president and technology equity research analyst at CFRA. Investors will be eager to see guidance.
“You kind of look at that and you wonder, is that going to be sustained?” Zino said.
Meanwhile, Meta continues investing heavily in its Reality Labs hardware division. The company’s strong online advertising business and previous rounds of major layoffs in 2022 and 2023 have helped quell the concerns of anxious investors, but Reality Labs’ expenses of $4.8 billion in the second quarter dwarfed the $353 million it generated in sales.
Zuckerberg’s showcase of the company’s Orion AR prototype AR glasses in September was viewed as a success by his employees, and Meta plans to court software developers in 2025 as it works toward a consumer version of the headset, CNBC reported earlier this month.
The excitement and buzz around Meta’s prototype Orion AR glasses and how they fit into the company’s long-term strategy seems to have eclipsed that of Apple and its competing Vision Pro VR headset, which debuted early this year at a starting price of $3,500, said Barton Crockett, managing director and senior research analyst at Rosenblatt Securities.
“The Orion shows a vision that’s interesting, and they’ve executed a lot better than Apple, which is something that nobody would have believed was possible,” Crockett said.
Meta also hopes to build off the excitement of its Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, which it develops in partnership with EssilorLuxottica. Crockett noted that because of the positive reaction to the Ray-Ban Meta glasses, those devices “could be a popular gift this Christmas.”
WATCH: Meta’s revenue has room to run despite all their AI spending.
Jensen Huang, chief executive officer of Nvidia Corp., during the US-Saudi Investment Forum at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, US, on Wednesday, Nov. 19, 2025.
Stefani Reynolds | Bloomberg | Getty Images
In the weeks leading up to Nvidia’s third-quarter earnings report, investors debated whether the markets were in an AI bubble, fretting over the massive sums being committed to building data centers and whether they could provide a long-term return on investment.
During Wednesday’s earnings call with analysts, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang began his comments by rejecting that premise.
“There’s been a lot of talk about an AI bubble,” Huang said. “From our vantage point we see something very different.”
In many respects, Huang’s remarks are to be expected. He’s leading the company at the heart of the artificial intelligence boom, and has built its market cap to $4.5 trillion because of soaring demand for Nvidia’s graphics processing units.
Huang’s smackdown of bubble talk matters because Nvidia counts every major cloud provider — Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Oracle — as a customer. Most of the major AI model developers, including OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI and Meta, are also big buyers of Nvidia GPUs.
Huang has deep visibility into the market, and on the call he offered a three-pronged argument for why we’re not in a bubble.
First, he said that areas like data processing, ad recommendations, search systems, and engineering, are turning to GPUs because they need the AI. That means older computing infrastructure based around the central processor will transition to new systems running on Nvidia’s chips.
Second, Huang said, AI isn’t just being integrated into current applications, but it will enable entirely new ones.
Finally, according to Huang, “agentic AI,” or applications that can run without significant input from the user, will be able to reason and plan, and will require even more computing power.
In making the case of Nvidia, Huang said it’s the only company that can address the three use cases.
“As you consider infrastructure investments, consider these three fundamental dynamics,” Huang said. “Each will contribute to infrastructure growth in the coming years.”
Reversing the slide
In its earnings release, Nvidia reported revenue and profit that sailed past estimates and issued better-than-expected guidance. Last month, Huang provided a $500 billion forecast for sales of the company’s AI chips over calendar 2025 and 2026.
The company said on Wednesday that its order backlog didn’t even include a few recent deals, like an agreement with Anthropic that was announced this week or the expansion of a deal with Saudi Arabia.
“The number will grow,” CFO Colette Kress said on the call, saying the company was on track to hit the forecast.
Prior to Wednesday’s results, Nvidia shares were down about 8% this month. Other stocks tied to the AI have gotten hit even harder, with CoreWeave plunging 44% in November, Oracle dropping 14% and Palantir falling 17%.
Some of the worry on Wall Street has been tied to the debt that certain companies have used to finance their infrastructure buildouts.
“Our customers’ financing is up to them,” Huang said.
Specific to Nvidia, investors have raised concerns in recent weeks about how much of the company’s sales were going to a small number of hyperscalers.
Last month, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon and Alphabet all lifted their forecasts for capital expenditures due to their AI buildouts, and now collectively expect to spend more than $380 billion this year.
Huang said that even without a new business model, Nvidia’s chips boost hyperscaler revenue, because they power recommendation systems for short videos, books, and ads.
People will soon start appreciating what’s happening underneath the surface of the AI boom, Huang said, versus “the simplistic view of what’s happening to capex and investment.”
WATCH: Nvidia posts Q3 beat
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