Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META | META Price Prediction) stock slipped 2% in afternoon trading on Thursday, with META shares trading at $602 and change. The move adds to a rough stretch that has the stock down 9% year-to-date and 6% over the past week. Yet, the real story today isn’t the price dip; rather, it’s the death of one era and the birth of another.
Meta is officially shutting down its VR metaverse, Horizon Worlds, as a standalone social platform, while announcing a sweeping pivot toward artificial intelligence. The company that spent years and tens of billions building a virtual world nobody showed up to is now betting its future on AI infrastructure, AI glasses, and personal superintelligence.
The Metaverse Is Dead; Long Live AI
Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been telegraphing this pivot for quarters. On the company’s Q4 2025 earnings call, he laid it out directly:
“For Reality Labs, we are directing most of our investment towards glasses and wearables going forward, while focusing on making Horizon a massive success on mobile and making VR a profitable ecosystem over the coming years.”
That’s a significant downgrade from the original vision of Horizon as the defining social platform of the next decade.
The financial reality behind that shift is stark. Reality Labs lost $19.2 billion for the full year 2025, with Q4 revenue of just $955 million doing little to offset the scale of that burn. Management expects similar losses in 2026, a financial drag Zuckerberg is now explicitly deprioritizing in favor of AI.
In place of the metaverse, Meta is going all-in on AI at a scale that’s hard to comprehend. That spending is going toward data centers, GPU clusters, and AI model training: the company guided for $115 to $135 billion in capital expenditures in 2026, up from $69.7 billion spent in 2025. That’s a complete reorientation of the company’s capital allocation strategy.
The AI Infrastructure Buildout Is Real
The deals backing that capex number are coming into view. Meta Platforms signed a $27 billion five-year revenue deal with Nebius (NASDAQ:NBIS) to deploy NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA) Vera Rubin GPUs beginning in 2027. Separately, Meta locked in a $6 billion multiyear partnership with Corning (NYSE:GLW) for optical fiber and multicore solutions powering AI data centers. These are long-term infrastructure commitments signaling Meta Platforms’ intention to own its AI compute stack rather than rent it.
Zuckerberg’s framing is ambitious:
“Our vision is building personal superintelligence. We’re starting to see the promise of AI that understands our personal context, including our history, our interests, our content, and our relationships.”
Meta AI already reached nearly 1 billion monthly active users as of Q1 2025, giving the company a distribution advantage most AI competitors simply don’t have.
Glasses, Retail, and the Physical Bet
Even as Meta Platforms shuts down its virtual world, it’s opening a physical one. The company signed a 10-year lease on a 15,000-square-foot flagship location at 697 Fifth Avenue in New York City, its first Manhattan retail store after a 2025 Los Angeles opening, to showcase AI glasses and VR headsets — products Zuckerberg described as “some of the fastest-growing consumer electronics in history.”
Glasses sales more than tripled in 2025. If AI glasses become a default consumer product the way smartphones did, Meta’s hardware bet could look prescient. The glasses are the physical embodiment of the AI pivot, not a continuation of the metaverse.
Meta Platforms: Bulls vs. Bears
Bernstein’s Stacy Rasgon has a $900 price target on META stock, and he is far from alone. The analyst community is nearly unanimously bullish, with a consensus target of $862.25 and virtually no Sell ratings among the 62 analysts have Buy ratings on Meta Platforms shares, with just 5 Holds and zero Sells analysts covering the stock.
The bull case rests on Meta’s core advertising business, which generated $200.97 billion in full-year 2025 revenue and continues to grow. Ad impressions were up 18% year-over-year in Q4, and the company’s 3.58 billion daily active users give it an audience no AI competitor can match. For a deeper look at how Meta stacks up against other high-growth names, this comparison of Meta and Netflix lays out the long-term case clearly.
Today’s dip is noise against a much bigger question: can Meta Platforms convert its AI infrastructure spending into durable revenue growth the way it converted social networking into an advertising juggernaut? The metaverse answer was no. The AI answer isn’t written yet, but the company is spending like it knows the ending.
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