Meta Stock Surges Near Record High. Everything to Know About the Facebook Parent’s Blowout Earnings.

Meta Platforms has been investing huge amounts in artificial intelligence. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Meta Platforms shares surged after the social-media company blew out second-quarter earnings expectations.

The stock rose 12% to $779.70 on Thursday, down slightly from its all-time intraday high of $784.75. If Meta stock reaches $796.13, it would pass $2 trillion in market capitalization.

Along with Alphabet’s second-quarter earnings report last week, Meta’s release reveals a lot of strength in digital advertising, at least for these two giants.

Meta credited artificial intelligence for boosting its results. “The strong performance this quarter is largely thanks to AI unlocking greater efficiency and gains across our ad system,” said CEO Mark Zuckerberg on the company’s second-quarter earnings call.

Earnings per share for Meta rose to $7.14 versus Wall Street’s consensus estimate of $5.88, according to FactSet, and up from $5.16 last year. Revenue for the quarter reached $47.5 billion, well above expectations of $44.8 billion, and up 22% on the year.

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Meta’s important metrics—daily users, ad impressions and price-per-ad—all exceeded the Wall Street consensus.

Meta also provided strong revenue guidance for the third quarter of $49 billion at the midpoint, exceeding the average analyst projection of $46 billion, and up 21% on the year.

Meta spent $17 billion on capital expenditures this quarter for new AI data centers to further its push into “superintelligence,” a machine that can do any intellectual work at least as well as the best human. Zuckerberg believes that the future of Meta hinges on its success in this effort. To fund that investment, Meta banked $26 billion in second-quarter operational cash flows.

In the first half of 2025 Meta has spent $31 billion on capex, so that puts it a little behind schedule for its annual guidance of $66 billion-$72 billion in data center spending.

And it isn’t cutting back. “We expect to ramp our investments significantly in 2026,” said chief financial officer Susan Li said on the earnings call.

Meta raised its expense guidance for 2025 by just a little, and that may be cause for investors to breath a sigh of relief. In addition to all the capex and the depreciation expenses they bring, Meta has also been on an AI hiring spree, poaching expensive researchers from Alphabet, OpenAI, and others for a new superintelligence team. It doesn’t seem like the cost of those new hires moved expenses much.

“I spent a lot of time building this team this quarter,” Zuckerberg said on the earnings call. “The reason that so many people are excited to join is because Meta has all of the ingredients that are required to build leading models and deliver them to billions of people.”

“I’ve just gotten a little bit more convinced around the ability for small talent dense teams to be the optimal configuration for driving frontier research,” he said.

During the first-quarter earnings call, Zuckerberg began his scripted presentation by laying out where the return on all this investment will come from.

For the second quarter, Meta released a Wednesday letter from Zuckerberg outlining a utopian vision of personal empowerment from AI. He sought to distinguish his company’s push from “others in the industry who believe superintelligence should be directed centrally towards automating all valuable work, and then humanity will live on a dole of its output.”

“Meta believes strongly in building personal superintelligence that empowers everyone,” he continued. “We have the resources and the expertise to build the massive infrastructure required, and the capability and will to deliver new technology to billions of people across our products.”

Right now, it’s powering the stock.

Write to Adam Levine at adam.levine@barrons.com