Meta shares rise on potential TikTok ban in U.S., closing at record alongside Amazon
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta Platforms Inc., arrives for the Meta Connect event in Menlo Park, California, on Sept. 25, 2024.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Meta shares continued their extended rally on Friday, rising 2.4% and closing at a record after a federal appeals court upheld a law requiring China’s ByteDance to sell TikTok or face an effective U.S. ban.
The Facebook parent has climbed 77% this year after almost tripling in 2023, pushing Meta’s market cap close to $1.6 trillion.
Alongside Meta, Amazon also closed at an all-time high on Friday and is up 49% this year. Apple slid slightly from its high on Thursday. The hefty gains this year among tech’s megacaps helped lift the Nasdaq to a record. The index rose 0.8% on Friday and has gained 32% in 2024.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg joined president-elect Donald Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida last week for a dinner, where he demonstrated the company’s camera-equipped Ray-Ban specs, Fox News first reported. Zuckerberg, who has been the subject of frequent verbal attacks by the incoming president, is apparently seeking an active role working with the Trump administration.
TikTok is one of Meta’s biggest rivals and has soared in popularity in recent years, particularly with younger audiences, and now has about 170 million users in the U.S. In April, President Joe Biden signed a law that would require ByteDance to divest the app, or companies such as Apple and Google as well as internet hosting providers would have to stop supporting it.
The unanimous ruling on Friday by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., rejected TikTok’s argument that the law is unconstitutional and violates the First Amendment rights of its users. TikTok said later Friday that it will ask the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the appeals court decision.
“The Supreme Court has an established historical record of protecting Americans’ right to free speech, and we expect they will do just that on this important constitutional issue,” a TikTok spokesperson said in an email.
Meta’s rally began in late 2022 and picked up steam early last year after Zuckerberg declared 2023 the “year of efficiency.” The company slashed about 21,000 jobs and rebuilt its advertising systems with the help of new advancements in artificial intelligence.
In its third-quarter earnings release, Meta reported a 19% increase in year-over-year revenue while warning of a significant acceleration in its infrastructure expenses in 2025. The company reported 3.29 billion “daily active people” for the third quarter, up just 5% year over year.
Zuckerberg has been talking up Meta’s efforts to develop new AI products and services, which will require spending billions of dollars on Nvidia graphics processing units and the energy to run them. Meta has been building out data centers to shore up the technology infrastructure needed for its AI strategy.
Posting on the Threads app on Friday, Zuckerberg said Meta AI “now has nearly 600 million monthly actives,” and will soon release version 3.3 of its Llama open-source large language model. Zuckerberg did not say how Meta counts a “monthly active” user for its AI technology.
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.”
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