Live: Will Meta (Nasdaq: META) Shares Soar After Announcing Q3 Earnings?

Meta Platform‘s (Nasdaq: META) conference call is over. The good news? Shares of Meta are off their after-hours lows. The bad news? They’re still down 7.3%.

We listened in to Meta’s entire conference call and took down the three biggest storylines which will be impacting shares when Meta begins trading tomorrow morning.

Expenses Are Growing Faster Than Revenue Again

Long-time Meta investors will remember the dark days of 2022. Late that year, Meta shares sank below $100 as sales growth evaporated and expenses ballooned.

The big investment at the time was the metaverse, today Meta is investing in AI.

Analyst Gene Munster crunched the numbers and found that Meta saw revenue grow 22% in June while expenses grew just 12%.

However, their guidance for next year calls for revenue growing 18% while expenses grow 35%. 

$META call just wrapped up.

I think I figured out why $META stock is down 9%.

Expenses are growing faster than revenue, driven by third party cloud. The last two years it’s been the flip story.

March revenue up 16% vs. expenses up 9%,
June revenue up 22% vs. expenses up 12%.…

— Gene Munster (@munster_gene) October 29, 2025

That’s concerning for investors because it reverses a period of excellent operating leverage that’s made Meta a profit machine. Zuckerberg clearly isn’t afraid of wasting a few hundred billion dollars to ‘win’ the AI race. Wall Street is starting to see those ambitions show up in the company’s performance.

Zuckerberg Says Meta is Operating in a ‘Perennially Compute Starved State’

The bull case for Meta is that the company has seen great ROI on their AI spend to date, with AI delivering significant engagement improvements across their suite of apps and improving advertising efficiency.

Here’s what Zuckerberg had to say about the company needing even more compute:

“We are sort of perennially operating the family of apps and ads business in a compute starved state at this point, which is, on the one hand, sort of an odd thing to say, given the compute that we built up. But we really are taking a lot of the resources and using them to advance future things that we’re doing, and we think that there’s a lot more compute that we could put towards these that would just unlock a huge amount of opportunity in the core business as well.”

The bottom line here, Zuckerbeg is indicating that a lot of incremental AI purchasing for the company isn’t just chasing ‘artificial superintelligence,’ it’s going to be used for Meta’s core businesses.

Capex Growth Will Grow Meaningfully Next Year

Meta investors know Zuckerberg is going to spend more on AI datacenters next year, they just don’t know how big the investment will be.

While Meta didn’t give specific figures, CFO Susan Li had this to say:

“As we have begun to plan for next year, it’s become clear that our compute needs have continued to expand meaningfully, including versus our own expectations last quarter. We are still working through our capacity plans for next year, but we expect to invest aggressively to meet these needs, both by building our own infrastructure and contracting with third-party cloud providers.

We anticipate this will provide further upward pressure on our CapEx and expense plans next year. As a result, our current expectation is that CapEx dollar growth will be notably larger in 2026 than 2025. We also anticipate total expenses will grow at a significantly faster percentage rate a than 2025, with growth primarily driven by infrastructure costs, including incremental cloud expenses and depreciation.

Employee compensation costs will be the second largest contributor to growth. As we recognize a full year of compensation for employees hired throughout 2025, particularly AI talent and add technical talent in priority areas.”

Wall Street currently expects Meta will spend $98 billion on capital expenditures next year (up from expectations of $71 billion of spend in 2025).

If Meta announces a number much higher than that in their next earnings, it could add significant volatility to the company’s share price.

Meta’s conference call is still going, shares haven’t made any major movements during it and are currently down 8% after-hours.

We’ve been covering Meta’s earnings across this live blog, and the bottom line is the company’s shares are down 9% after-hours. So there are areas of concern with Meta’s Q3 earnings.

Let’s break down what investors are most worried about.

• First, the company’s EPS miss isn’t particularly concerning. Meta took a one-time charge in the third quarter.
• Second, Meta expects its capital expenditures to be ‘notably larger’ in 2026 versus 2025. There could be some concern form investors at the size of the investment Zuckerberg is planning to make.
• Third, the company’s forward guidance is disappointing. Meta guided to $57.5 billion at the midpoint, which was only slightly above Wall Street’s expectations.
• And finally, it’s worth noting that Meta once again took capital expenditure plans up for the current year, to $71 billion at the midpoint.

Are we surprised by this level of reaction to Meta’s earnings? Overall, it does seem very large relative to forward guidance that could be considered slightly weak. Perhaps this is Wall Street seeing guidance that expenses next year will grow significantly faster in 2026 (the company also raised its guidance for fiscal year 2025 expenses).

Regardless, Meta’s conference call is now live. You can register to join here.

• Microsoft: Down 2.1%
• Alphabet: Up 5.7%
• Meta: Down 9%
• ServiceNow: Up 4.7%

“Our outlook reflects an expectation for continued strong ad revenue growth, partially offset by lower year-over-year Reality Labs revenue in the fourth quarter. The anticipated reduction in Reality Labs revenue is due to us lapping the introduction of Quest 3S in the fourth quarter of last year as well as retail partners procuring Quest headsets during the third quarter of this year to prepare for the holiday season, which were recorded as revenue in the third quarter.”

As a reminder, we believe Meta’s outlook is the primary reason shares are down 8% after-hours. 

More updates to come… 

“We had a good quarter driven by AI progress across our apps and business,” said Mark Zuckerberg, underscoring robust momentum with Meta AI, Llama adoption and AI-powered glasses.

His overall tone was bullish, emphasizing AI as the key engine behind this performance.

We’re still digesting Meta’s earnings release and Wall Street’s reaction.

• The big EPS miss was due to a $15.9 billion one-time expense and will largely be ignored
• Revenue guidance of $56 billion to $59 billion is likely what’s weighing on shares. Wall Street expected $57.26 billion. Simply put, that guidance isn’t a big enough beat to lift shares.

META | Meta Platforms, Inc. Q3’25 Earnings Highlights:

• Adj. EPS: $1.05 ❌; DOWN -83% YoY
• Revenue: $51.24B; UP +26% YoY
• Comparable Sales: ➖
• Adj. Gross Margin: ➖
• Net Income: $2.71B; DOWN -83% YoY
• Effective Tax Rate: 87% (vs. 12% YoY)

Q3’25 Outlook:

• Revenue: $56-59B ➖
  • Our guidance assumes foreign currency is an approximately 1% tailwind to year-over-year total revenue growth, based on current exchange rates.
  • We expect continued strong ad revenue growth, partially offset by lower year-over-year Reality Labs revenue in the fourth quarter.

Q3 Segment Performance:

• Family of Apps Revenue: $50.77B; UP +26% YoY
• Reality Labs Revenue: $470M; UP +74% YoY

Other Key Q3 Metrics:

• Adj. Operating Income: $20.54B; UP +18% YoY
• Adj. Operating Expenses: $30.71B; UP +32% YoY
• Free Cash Flow: $10.62B; DOWN -27% YoY
• Cash, Cash Equivalents, and Marketable Securities: $44.45B
• Headcount: 78,450; UP +8% YoY

CEO Commentary:

• Mark Zuckerberg: “We had a strong quarter for our business and our community. Meta Superintelligence Labs is off to a great start and we continue to lead the industry in AI glasses. If we deliver even a fraction of the opportunity ahead, then the next few years will be the most exciting period in our history.”

CFO Commentary:

• David Wehner: “We expect fourth quarter 2025 total revenue to be in the range of $56-59 billion. Our outlook reflects an expectation for continued strong ad revenue growth, partially offset by lower year-over-year Reality Labs revenue in the fourth quarter.”

Other Executives:

• Sheryl Sandberg, COO: “Our investments in AI and infrastructure are crucial for our future growth and will help us capitalize on new revenue opportunities.”

Meta shares are now down 6% – we have a full summary posting shortly.

Meta’s earnings are out…

An EPS of $1.05 (we’re gonna need to dig into this) and revenue of $51.24 billion beats. Shares are initially down 7%.

Here we go, it’s almost time for Meta’s earnings.

As a reminder, simply leave this page open, and new updates will begin posting as soon as earnings hit the newswires. We expect the stock to begin moving slightly after 4:05 pm. ET.

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It’s 3:45, which means we’re now just 20 minutes away from Meta’s Q3 earnings.

The company’s shares have turned slightly positive in late trading.

The market recently has seen poor ‘breadth’ – which means that while indexes are gaining, most stocks are seeing declines. Today it’s mostly red across financials, healthcare, real estate, and consumer defensive stocks.

In technology, software application companies are getting generally hammered today while semiconductor stocks are soaring after NVIDIA revealed yesterday that Wall Street’s estimates for the company are likely far too low in 2026.

AI infrastructure plays are rallying today, but those companies gain thanks to Meta’s ambitious spending plans. It will be interesting to watch how Wall Street reacts to more commentary from Mark Zuckerberg on how much Meta plans to invest in AI in the years ahead.

Prediction markets are placing 90% odds that Meta beats earnings tonight (listed at $6.72).

Those odds are probably about right, Meta has beat earnings every quarter since October 2022 (a streak of 11 quarters in a row).

Just remember that simply beating earnings won’t be enough to lift Meta’s shares tomorrow. Investors will also be looking at the company’s revenue gudiance and commentary abou their massive bet on AI spending.

It’s been a long time since Meta missed earnings. As you can see, merely beating Wall Street’s expectations won’t guarantee the stock is up tomorrow. Meta will likely need an earnings surprise that’s 10% or higher than Wall Street’s EPS expectations for shares to rise after hours.