Meta Reports 20M User Drop While Boosting AI Investment to $145B

Meta is planning to pump billions more into AI investments this year, despite noting that millions of users have seemingly started to abandon its platforms. In an earning call on Wednesday, Meta reported that figures for "Family daily active people" — the term Meta has coined for all collective users of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, or Messenger — declined by 20 million this quarter compared to the previous three months. Meta attributes this fall to "internet disruptions in Iran, as well as a restriction on access to WhatsApp in Russia." It's up to you whether you take Meta on its word, given that by bundling the user stats together across all its platforms, we can't tell which ones are most impacted. If I wanted to obscure that a leading social platform was potentially hemorrhaging daily users, that's certainly what I would do. This drop comes as Meta says it's increasing its projected capital expenditures for 2026 to a range of $125-145 billion, $10 billion more than previous estimates. This increased spending is driven by expectations for higher component pricing and, "to a lesser extent," additional costs for future data center capacity. This is a course correction, according to Meta's chief financial officer Susan Li, who said in the investor call that Meta had "underestimated our compute demand in the past." Meta's revenue also experienced its fastest growth since 2021, increasing by 33 percent, from $42.3 billion this time last year to $56.3 billion this quarter. Some divisions aren't doing so hot though — the Reality Labs unit that builds wearables and virtual reality devices reported an operating loss of $4.03 billion over the three-month quarter, and follows Meta's Reality Labs employees being hit by two waves of layoffs since January. Meta's stock price has fallen by more than 7 percent at the time of writing, compared to before the company's earnings release.