Meta now reaches nearly 3.5 billion users across Facebook, Instagram and other apps. And Mark Zuckerberg says the company’s mission is to bring AI “personal superintelligence” to all of them.
The company reported second-quarter 2025 earnings that dramatically topped Wall Street expectations. Meta generated revenue of $47.52 billion, up 22%, and turned in net profit of $18.34 billion, a year-over-year increase of 36%, translating to earnings per share of $7.14. Analyst consensus estimates were for $44.8 billion in revenue and EPS of $5.92, per LSEG.
Meta also issued bullish Q3 guidance, projecting total revenue to be in the range of $47.5 billion-$50.5 billion, which would be up 17% to 24%.
Earlier Wednesday, Zuckerberg laid out his vision for Meta with regard to “superintelligence,” an ill-defined term that some have described as a hypothetical AI system that supersedes human intelligence. “I am extremely optimistic that superintelligence will help humanity accelerate our pace of progress,” the Meta co-founder and CEO wrote in a post. “But perhaps even more important is that superintelligence has the potential to begin a new era of personal empowerment where people will have greater agency to improve the world in the directions they choose.”
Zuckerberg continued, “Meta’s vision is to bring personal superintelligence to everyone. We believe in putting this power in people’s hands to direct it towards what they value in their own lives.” He contrasted that with “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.”
If AI trends continue, according to Zuckerberg’s crystal-balling, people will “spend less time in productivity software, and more time creating and connecting.”
Zuckerberg is spending a ton to try to accelerate Meta’s AI capabilities relative to competitors like Google and OpenAI.
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Last month, Meta announced a $14.3 billion investment in AI-training start-up Scale AI. As part of that, Scale founder and CEO Alexandr Wang is joining Meta as chief AI officer and will co-lead the new Meta Superintelligence Labs (According to Scale AI, Wang will continue to serve as a director on the Scale board of directors and “support Scale’s ongoing work to unlock the power of AI and keep human values at the forefront.”)
In April, driven by AI investments, Meta raised expected 2025 capital expenditures to between $64 billion-$72 billion, increased from its prior expectation of $60 billion-$65 billion.
On Wednesday, Meta CFO Susan Li narrowed that capex range to $66 billion-$72 billion, which at the midpoint is up approximately $30 billion versus 2024. Looking ahead, Li said in prepared remarks, the company expects “similarly significant” capex growth in 2026 “as we continue aggressively pursuing opportunities to bring additional capacity online to meet the needs of our artificial intelligence efforts and business operations.”
During June 2025, Meta said daily active users across its apps averaged 3.48 billion, up 6% year-over-year (and up from 3.43 billion three months prior). The company’s “Family daily active people (DAP)” metric encompasses Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp and Threads.
Meta had 75,945 employees as of June 30, 2025, an increase of 7% year over year. The company had $47.07 billion in cash and equivalents as of the end of Q2, with free cash flow of $8.55 billion for the period.
From Variety US