This ranking evaluates how Fortune 500 companies are deploying AI, and how technology leaders value those investments relative to industry peers.

Fortune AIQ 75

The companies on the Global 500 employ 70.2 million people, and their revenue represents more than one-third of the world’s GDP.

Fortune Global 500

With a combined revenue of $21 trillion and $2.1 trillion in profits, the 2026 Fortune 500 is the definitive list of America's largest companies.

Fortune 500

AI is a major force shaping this year’s list—but it’s far from the only story.

World's Most Admired Companies

Fortune AIQ 50

The corporations on our annual list of the world's 500 largest companies combined to generate $41.7 trillion in revenue over the past year.

Almost $20 trillion in revenue—and a record-breaking $1.87 trillion in profits. Introducing the 2025 Fortune 500, the definitive list of the biggest companies in America.

Meta Platforms leaped eight spots to No.&nbsp;22 as its revenue rose 22% year over year, powered by advertising on Facebook and Instagram. Profits topped $62&nbsp;billion, even as Meta spent prodigiously on AI development.

The 300 companies on this year’s list brought in over $12.6 trillion in revenue for the latest 12 months, with the median revenue figure at $22 billion.

America's Most Innovative Companies

Leaders in all industries rely more than ever on Big Tech—and appreciate the giants that deliver, at scale, without drama.

These 50 companies exemplify the innovation, progress, and potential of AI.

AI Innovators 2025-Meta

Fortune 50 AI Innovators

The corporations on our annual list posted aggregate revenues of $41 trillion for the second year in a row.

Industries included in the sector are computers, internet services, IT services, semiconductors, and software companies.

Fortune Sector Leaders: Technology

The Fortune 500, in its 70th year in 2024, ranks the biggest U.S. companies by revenue.

The 26th edition of the list shows how much esteem Big Tech giants command among other business leaders.

The 25th Fortune World’s Most Admired Companies list suggests that tech giants’ peers respect them as much as ever.

The corporations on our annual list of the world’s largest companies delivered a record $41 trillion in aggregate revenues.

GLOBAL-500-2023-Meta-Platforms

The 300 companies on this list are transforming industries from the inside out.

The Fortune 500, in its 69th year in 2023, ranks the biggest U.S. companies by revenue.

F500 2023-Meta

The social media giant and metaverse pioneer formerly named Facebook posted a 1% decline in revenues in 2022, the first such decline in its history as a public company; it still brought in nearly $117 billion. 
<ul> 
 	<li>With a round of layoffs announced in late 2022 and another in spring 2023, Meta cut about 21,000 jobs, or roughly a quarter of its workforce. CEO Mark Zuckerberg described 2023 as a “year of efficiency” in which a leaner Meta can execute its highest priorities more quickly.</li> 
 	<li>Meta pivoted some of its attention and resources from the metaverse to generative A.I. In February 2023, the company announced an A.I. language model called LLaMA that it would use in its chatbots to compete with Google and Microsoft.</li> 
 	<li>In May 2023, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission accused Meta’s core Facebook platform of violating an earlier agreement in which the company had pledged to protect the data of users of its Messenger Kids app. The FTC proposed modifying the agreement to forbid Meta from monetizing minors’ data in any way. The company strongly objected to the proposal, calling it a “political stunt.”</li> 
 	<li>Later in May, the European Union ordered Meta to stop sending Europeans’ personal data to the U.S., and imposed a $1.3 billion fine on the company for its past data transfers, which it said violated European privacy laws.</li> 
</ul>

Aggregate sales hit $37.8 trillion last year—an increase of 19%, the highest annual growth rate in the list’s history.

This year’s Fortune 500 marks the 68th running of the list.

F500 2022 Meta

The company formerly known as Facebook climbed seven spots on this year’s Fortune 500; its revenue grew 37.2% in 2021, to $118 billion, and it generated nearly $40 billion in profit. But the name change to Meta Platforms, announced by CEO Mark Zuckerberg in October 2021, is a sign of some of the challenges the company now faces. Meta Platforms’ core social media product, Facebook itself, saw its number of daily active users decline for the first time over the last three months of 2021. Meta also acknowledged that recent changes in privacy settings on Apple’s iOS apps were hurting Facebook’s ad-sales revenue. That changing landscape adds momentum to Meta’s new commitment to the metaverse, the digital and virtual world that Citi predicts will be worth $13 trillion in 2030. In December, Meta disclosed that it had already spent $10 billion on metaverse-related projects. The company admits those will take a long time to pay off, however, and Wall Street is concerned: The company’s share price fell almost 40% over the first four months of 2022.

Total revenue for the world’s biggest companies fell 4.8% to $31.7 trillion this year—the first decline in half a decade.

G500-2021-086-Facebook

Facebook, it appears, can’t be hurt—not by major ad buyers boycotting its service, not by state and federal investigations, and not even by a pandemic. Despite the impact of COVID-19 on its ad sales, Facebook impressed Wall Street all year by beating expectations. The company ended 2020 with almost $86 billion in revenues, up 22% year over year, and with $29 billion in profits, up nearly 58%. But Facebook faced major backlash for lax handling of hate on its service, including from former President Donald Trump, whom the service eventually barred after the U.S. Capitol riot. And this year, Facebook risks a big financial hit owing to Apple’s new privacy controls that let users limit tracking of their data.

This year’s Fortune 500 marks the 67th running of the list.

F500-2021-34-Facebook

Collectively, the ranked companies produced a three-year average shareholder return of 33%, vs. 19% for the S&P 500.

FGC-2021-Facebook

100 Fastest-Growing Companies

For an astounding 13th straight year, Apple claims the top spot in Fortune’s annual ranking of corporate reputation, based on a survey of almost 3,800 executives, directors, and analysts.

This year's Fortune Global 500 generated $33.3 trillion in revenues and $2.1 trillion in profits.

G500-2020-144-Facebook

Facebook was the focus of increased government scrutiny in 2019. Regulators at the state, federal, and international level reviewed the ways the company has handled user data and permitted the dissemination of misinformation—investigations that sometimes led to hefty fines or other penalties. Despite the mounting heat, Facebook continued to rake in revenue in 2019. The company, led by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, had $70.7 billion in sales, up nearly 27% from the previous year. But 2020 will be a particularly challenging one for Facebook as it tries to proactively remove misinformation about the coronavirus pandemic while policing bad actors on its platform during the upcoming U.S. presidential election.

Explore this year's ranking of the 50 companies with the best long-term growth potential.

Future-50-2020-Facebook

Last but not least, the social media player’s underlying business remains strong. And new business opportunities continue to emerge: A global e-commerce strategy (including WhatsApp Pay) shows signs of promise, for example. Analysts project 17% to 20% future, long-term growth. At the same time, reputational risk is high—as is the very real threat of regulatory crackdowns across different regions, including the United States. Perhaps even more ominous, the Facebook core product is seeing declining engagement levels with younger demographics. In short: There is a reason the social network is on this list, but also a reason it comes in at No. 50.

The Future 50

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 66th running of the list.

F500-2020-046-Facebook

Facebook was the focus of increased government scrutiny in 2019. Regulators at the state, federal, and international level reviewed the ways the company has handled user data and permitted the dissemination of misinformation—investigations that sometimes led to hefty fines or other penalties. But despite the mounting heat, Facebook continued to rake in revenue in 2019. The company, led by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, had $70.7 billion in sales, up nearly 27% from the previous year, which helped it rise nearly a dozen ranks in the Fortune 500. But 2020 will be particularly challenging one for Facebook as it tries to proactively remove misinformation about the coronavirus pandemic while policing bad actors on its platform during the upcoming U.S. presidential election.

Collectively, the ranked companies produced a three-year average shareholder return of 19%, vs. 11% for the S&P 500.

Fastest Growing Companies 2020-52-Facebook

Here are the World's Most Admired Companies for 2019 as ranked in their industries. See who made the list.

This year's Fortune Global 500 generated $27.7 trillion in revenues and $1.5 trillion in profits.

Fortune's proprietary methodology allows us to zero in on the 50 global firms that are best poised to deliver—and continue delivering—above average gains.

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 65th running of the list.

Everybody loves an up-and-comer: 2019's top three-year performers in revenues, profits, and stock returns.

Here are the World's Most Admired Companies for 2018 as ranked in their industries. See who made the list.

Welcome to the inaugural Fortune Future 50, our new ranking of companies best positioned for breakout growth.

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 64th running of the list.

Everybody loves an up-and-comer: 2018's top three-year performers in revenues, profits, and stock returns.

Here are the World's Most Admired Companies for 2017 as ranked in their industries. See who made the list.

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 63rd running of the list.

Everybody loves an up-and-comer: 2017's top three-year performers in revenues, profits, and stock returns.

Here are the World's Most Admired Companies for 2016 as ranked in their industries. See who made the list.

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 62nd running of the list.

Too fast to be stopped: 2016's top three-year performers in revenue, profits, and stock returns.

Business insiders have spoken: Asked which companies they most admire, more than 4,100 executives, directors, and analysts chose these top 50 All-Stars.

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 61st running of the list. Wal-Mart claims the top spot again. See who made the list.

Nike, Cisco, MasterCard, SABMiller, Vodafone, Google—and 45 other companies that are doing well by doing good.

Change the World

This year's Fastest-Growing Companies marks the 19th running of the list. In our annual list of public companies with the most stellar three-year profit, revenue, and stock growth, Facebook makes its first appearance.

Wal-Mart stayed on top as its sales crept closer to half-a-trillion dollars. Apple moved into the top five. And UnitedHealth Group continued its steady climb. 

Fastest-growing Companies

Revenue 3 Yr Growth Rank

Revenue 3 Yr Annual Growth Rate

EPS 3 Yr Growth Rank

EPS 3 Yr Annual Growth Rate

Total Return 3 Yr Rank

Total Return 3 Yr Annual Rate

Beat S&P 500 3 Yr Return

Current Streak

Years on List

Sector

Future 50

Overall Score

Culture rank

Process rank

Product rank

Years on list

Previous rank

Industry

Current All-Star Rank

Previous All-Star Rank

Industry Rank

Previous Industry Rank

Innovation

People Management

Use of Corporate Assets

Social Responsibility

Quality of Management

Financial Soundness

Long-Term Investment Value

Quality of Products/Services

Global Competitiveness

Key Financials (last Fiscal Year)

Revenues ($M)

Profits ($M)

Assets ($M)

Total Stockholder Equity ($M)

Profit Ratios

Profit as % of Revenues

Profits as % of Assets

Profits as % of Stockholder Equity

Earnings Per Share (last Fiscal Year)

Earnings Per Share ($)

EPS % Change (from prior fiscal year)

EPS % Change (5 year annual rate)

EPS % Change (10 year annual rate)

Total Return

Total Return to Investors (last year)

Total Return to Investors (5 year, annualized)

Total Return to Investors (10 year, annualized)

Founded in 2004 as Facebook, Meta operates the world’s largest social media platforms and has heavily influenced the development of the internet over the past two decades through its pioneering use of personal data collection and targeted advertising. Meta’s products include Facebook, image-sharing app Instagram, and messaging platforms Messenger and WhatsApp; together, they enable users to keep in touch, share images and videos, and buy and sell goods. Meta’s Reality Labs segment develops virtual-reality-related consumer hardware and software, while Meta AI develops artificial intelligence tools including language-processing models. Facebook renamed itself Meta in 2021.

Q2 2026

Q1 2026

Q4 2025

Q3 2025

Q2 2025

Q1 2025

Q4 2024

Meta Platforms (META): Company Profile, Stock Price, News, Rankings

legacy

Meta Platforms

meta platforms

Good afternoon. My name is Krista, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Meta Third Quarter Earnings Conference Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, again press star one. We ask that you limit yourself to one question, and this call will be recorded. Thank you very much. Kenneth Dorell, Meta's Director of Investor Relations, you may begin.

Thank you. Good afternoon and welcome to Meta's Third Quarter 2025 Earnings Conference Call. Joining me today are Mark Zuckerberg, CEO, and Susan Li, CFO. Our remarks today will include forward-looking statements, which are based on assumptions as of today. Actual results may differ materially as a result of various factors, including those set forth in today's earnings press release and in our quarterly report on Form 10-Q filed with the SEC. We undertake no obligation to update any forward-looking statement. During this call, we will present both GAAP and certain non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP measures is included in today's earnings press release. The earnings press release and an accompanying investor presentation are available on our website at investor.appmeta.com. I would now like to turn the call over to Mark.

All right. Thanks, Ken. Thanks, everyone, for joining today. We had another strong quarter with 3.5 billion people using at least one of our apps every day. Instagram hit a major milestone with 3 billion monthly actives, and we're seeing good momentum across our other apps as well, including Threads, which recently passed 150 million daily actives and remains on track to become the leader in its category. I am very focused on establishing Meta as the leading frontier AI lab, building personal superintelligence for everyone, and delivering the app experiences and computing devices that will improve the lives of billions of people around the world. Our approach of advancing open-source AI means that when Meta innovates, everyone benefits. Meta's Superintelligence Lab is off to a strong start. I think that we've already built the lab with the highest talent density in the industry.

We're heads down developing our next generation of models and products, and I'm looking forward to sharing more on that front over the coming months. We're also building what we expect to be an industry-leading amount of compute. Now, there's a range of timelines for when people think that we're going to get superintelligence. Some people think that we'll get there in a few years. Others think it will be five, seven years, or longer. I think that it's the right strategy to aggressively front-load building capacity so that way we're prepared for the most optimistic cases. That way, if superintelligence arrives sooner, we will be ideally positioned for a generational paradigm shift and many large opportunities.

If it takes longer, then we'll use the extra compute to accelerate our core business, which continues to be able to profitably use much more compute than we've been able to throw at it. We're seeing very high demand for additional compute, both internally and externally. In the worst case, we would just slow building new infrastructure for some period while we grow into what we build. The upside is extremely high for both our existing apps and new products and businesses that are becoming possible to build. Across Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, our AI recommendation systems are delivering higher quality and more relevant content, which led to 5% more time spent on Facebook in Q3 and 10% on Threads. Video is a particular bright spot, with video time spent on Instagram up more than 30% since last year.

As video continues to grow across our apps, Reels now has an annual run rate of over $50 billion. Improvements in our recommendation systems will also become even more leveraged as the volume of AI-created content grows. Social media has gone through two eras so far. The first was when all content was from friends, family, and accounts that you followed directly. The second was when we added all of the creator content. Now, as AI makes it easier to create and remix content, we're going to add yet another huge corpus of content on top of those. Recommendation systems that understand all this content more deeply and can show you the right content to help you achieve your goals are going to be increasingly valuable. Our ads business continues to perform very well, largely due to improvements in our AI ranking systems as well.

This quarter, we saw meaningful advances from unifying different models into simpler, more general models, which drive both better performance and efficiency. Now, the annual run rate going through our completely end-to-end AI-powered ad tools has passed $60 billion. One way that I think about our company overall is that there are three giant transformers that run Facebook, Instagram, and ads recommendations. We have a very strong pipeline of lots of ways to improve these models by incorporating new AI advances and capabilities. At the same time, we are also working on combining these three major AI systems into a single unified AI system that will effectively run our family of apps and business, using increasing intelligence to improve the trillions of recommendations that we'll make for people every day. I'm also very excited about the new products that we're going to be able to build.

More than a billion monthly actives already use Meta AI, and we see usage increase as we improve our underlying models. I'm very excited to get a frontier model into Meta AI, and I think that the opportunity there is very large. The same goes for our business AI. Every day, people have more than 1 billion active threads with business accounts across our messaging platforms, ranging from product questions to customer support. Our business AIs will enable tens of millions of businesses to scale these conversations and improve their sales at low cost. The better our models get, the better this is going to work for all businesses. This quarter, we also launched Vibes, which is the next generation of our AI creation tools and content experiences. Retention is looking good so far, and its usage keeps growing quickly week over week.

I'm looking forward to ramping up the growth of Vibes over the coming months. More broadly, I think that Vibes is an example of a new content type enabled by AI, and I think that there are more opportunities to build many more novel types of content ahead as well. As our new models become ready, I'm looking forward to starting to show everyone some of the new kinds of products that we're working on. At Connect, we announced our 2025 line of AI glasses, and the response so far has been great. The new Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses and Oakley Meta Vanguards are both selling well, as people love the improved battery life, camera resolution, new AI capabilities, and the great design. There is our new Meta Ray-Ban display glasses, our first glasses with a high-resolution display and the Meta Neural Band to interact with them.

They sold out in almost every store within 48 hours, with demo slots fully booked through the end of next month. We are going to have to invest in increasing manufacturing and selling more of those. This is an area where we are clearly leading and have a huge opportunity ahead. Taking a step back, if we deliver even a fraction of the opportunity ahead for our existing apps and the new experiences that are possible, then I think that the next few years will be the most exciting period in our history. We've got a lot to do, but we're making real progress, delivering strong business results, building the talent density and infrastructure needed for the next era, and leading the way on AI devices that will define the next computing platform.

I'm proud of how our teams are rising to the challenge, and I'm grateful for their dedication, hard work, and creativity. As always, thank you all for being a part of this journey with us. Now, here's Susan.

Thanks, Mark, and good afternoon, everyone. Let's begin with our segment results. All comparisons are on a year-over-year basis unless otherwise noted. Our community across the family of apps continues to grow, and we estimate more than 3.5 billion people used at least one of our family of apps on a daily basis in September. Q3 total family of apps revenue was $50.8 billion, up 26% year-over-year. Q3 family of apps ad revenue was $50.1 billion, up 26%, or 25% on a constant currency basis. In Q3, the total number of ad impressions served across our services increased 14%. Impression growth was healthy across all regions, driven by engagement and user growth, particularly on video services. The average price per ad increased 10% year-over-year, benefiting from increased advertiser demand, largely driven by improved ad performance.

This was partially offset by impression growth, particularly from lower monetizing regions and services. Family of apps other revenue was $690 million, up 59%, driven by WhatsApp paid messaging revenue growth, as well as Meta verified subscriptions. Within our reality lab segment, Q3 revenue was $470 million, up 74% year-over-year. The significant year-over-year growth in Q3 was partly due to retail partners stocking up on Quest headsets ahead of the holiday season. We did not have a similar benefit in the third quarter of last year since our Quest 3S headset launched in the fourth quarter of 2024. Aside from this, strong AI glasses revenue also contributed to revenue growth in Q3. Moving now to our consolidated results. Q3 total revenue was $51.2 billion, up 26% or 25% on a constant currency basis. Q3 total expenses were $30.7 billion, up 32% compared to last year.

Year-over-year expense growth accelerated 20 percentage points from Q2, due primarily to three factors. First, legal-related expense growth was higher than in Q2 due to charges we recorded in the third quarter, as well as us lapping a period of accrual reversals in the third quarter a year ago. Second, employee compensation growth accelerated, driven by technical hires, particularly AI talent. Finally, growth in infrastructure costs accelerated due to increased infrastructure operating costs associated with our expanded data center fleet, depreciation on our incremental CapEx spend, and third-party cloud spend. We ended Q3 with over 78,400 employees, up 8% year-over-year, driven by hiring in priority areas of monetization, infrastructure, Reality Labs, Meta Superintelligence Labs, as well as regulation and compliance. Third quarter operating income was $20.5 billion, representing a 40% operating margin.

Q3 interest and other income was $1.1 billion, driven primarily by unrealized gains on our marketable equity securities. Our tax rate for the quarter was 87%, which was unfavorably impacted by a one-time non-cash reduction in deferred tax assets that we no longer anticipate using under new U.S. tax law. Our tax rate would have been 14% excluding this charge. Although the transition to the new U.S. tax law resulted in an accounting charge in the third quarter, we continue to expect we will recognize significant cash tax savings for the remainder of the current year and future years under the new law, and this quarter's charge reflects the total expected impact from the transition to the new U.S. tax law. Net income was $2.7 billion, or $1.05 per share. Excluding the one-time tax charge, our net income and EPS would have been $18.6 billion and $7.25 per share, respectively.

Capital expenditures, including principal payments on finance leases, were $19.4 billion, driven by investments in servers, data centers, and network infrastructure. Free cash flow was $10.6 billion. We repurchased $3.2 billion of our Class A common stock and paid $1.3 billion in dividends to shareholders. We ended the quarter with $44.4 billion in cash and marketable securities and $28.8 billion in debt. Turning now to the business outlook, there are two primary factors that drive our revenue performance: our ability to deliver engaging experiences for our community and our effectiveness at monetizing that engagement over time. On the first, daily actives continue to grow year-over-year across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. We're continuing to see improvements to our products and recommendations drive incremental engagement, with year-over-year growth in global time spent accelerating on both Facebook and Instagram in Q3.

In the U.S., overall time spent on Facebook and Instagram grew double digits year-over-year, driven by continued video strength as well as healthy growth in non-video time on Facebook. The engagement gains continue to be driven by product work and ongoing improvements to our recommendation systems as we optimize our model architectures, implement advanced modeling techniques, and integrate more signals about people's interests. We also continue to focus on increasing the freshness of recommended content. On Facebook, our systems are now surfacing twice as many Reels published that day than at the start of the year. Looking to 2026, we expect to advance our recommendation systems across several dimensions. On Instagram, one focus is evolving our systems to surface content across a broader set of topics that cater to the diverse interests of each person.

This follows a similar approach we've implemented on Facebook that has driven good results. We also expect to make significant progress on our longer-term ranking innovations in 2026. We're seeing promising new results from our research efforts to create foundational ranking models and expect the new model innovations we're developing as part of this will enable us to significantly scale up the amount of data and compute we use to train our recommendation models in 2026, yielding more relevant recommendations. Another large focus next year is leveraging LLMs to improve content understanding. We expect this is going to enable our systems to more precisely label the keywords and topics within videos and posts, which will allow our systems to both develop deeper intuition about a person's interests and retrieve the content that matches them. Finally, we're making good progress with Meta AI and Threads.

The number of people using Meta AI across our family of apps continues to grow, and we're increasingly leveraging first-party content into Meta AI results, with the majority of Meta AI's responses to Facebook deep dive queries in the U.S. now showing related Reels. We're also seeing a lot of traction with media generation. People have created over 20 billion images using our products, and since launching Vibes within Meta AI in September, we've seen media generation in the app increase more than tenfold. On Threads, we see strong growth in both daily actives and the depth of engagement as we continue to improve recommendations. The ranking optimizations we made in Q3 alone drove a 10% increase in time spent on Threads. We also continue to ship new features, including launching direct messaging in Q3, so anyone on Threads can now message one another within the app.

Now to the second driver of our revenue performance: increasing monetization efficiency. The first part of this work is optimizing the level of ads within organic engagement. We continue to refine ad supply across each of our major services within Facebook and Instagram to better deliver ads at the time and place they are most relevant to people. Longer term, we have exciting ad supply opportunities on both Threads and WhatsApp status. Ads are now running globally in feed on Threads, and we're following our typical monetization playbook of optimizing the ads formats and performance before we ramp supply. Within WhatsApp status, we're continuing to gradually introduce ads and expect to complete the rollout next year. The second part of increasing monetization efficiency is improving marketing performance.

Advancing our ad systems remains a critical aspect of this work, and we are driving performance gains through ongoing improvements in our larger-scale ads ranking models. For example, we continue to broaden the adoption of Lattice, our unified model architecture. In Q3, we rolled out Lattice to app ads, which drove a nearly 3% gain in conversions for that objective. Since introducing Lattice back in 2023, along with other backend improvements, we have now cut the number of ads ranking and recommendation models by approximately 100, as we consolidated smaller and more specialized models into larger ones that use the Lattice architecture to generalize learnings across surfaces and objectives. We continue to observe performance improvements as we combine models and expect to drive additional gains as we consolidate another 200 models over the coming years into a smaller number of highly capable models.

In addition to advancing our foundational ads models, we're innovating on our runtime models we use downstream of them for ads inference. For example, we began piloting a new runtime ads ranking model in Q3 that leverages more compute and data than our prior models to select more relevant ads. In testing, we've seen this new model drive a more than 2% lift in conversions on Instagram. We also significantly improved performance of Andromeda in Q3 by combining models across retrieval and early-stage ranking into a single model, driving a 14% increase in ads quality on Facebook services. Within our ads products, we're seeing continued momentum with Advantage+. In Q3, we completed the rollout of our streamlined campaign creation flow for Advantage+ lead campaigns.

Now advertisers running sales app or lead campaigns have end-to-end automation turned on from the beginning, allowing our systems to look across our platform to optimize performance by automatically choosing criteria like who to show the ads to and where to show them. The annual run rate of revenue running through our end-to-end automated solutions has now reached $60 billion following the implementation of the new streamlined creation flow, as we continue to see more advertisers leverage the performance benefits of our solutions. Within our Advantage+ Creative Suite, the number of advertisers using at least one of our video generation features was up 20% versus the prior quarter, as adoption of image animation and video expansion continues to scale. We've also added more generative AI features to make it easier for advertisers to optimize their ad creatives and drive increased performance.

In Q3, we introduced AI-generated music so advertisers can have music generated for their ad that aligns with the tone and message of the creative. Finally, business messaging remains a significant opportunity for us. We're seeing strong growth across our portfolio of solutions, including with click-to-WhatsApp ads, which grew revenue 60% year-over-year in Q3. We're also making good progress on our business AI efforts, where we've been focused on building a turnkey AI that helps businesses generate leads and drive sales. We've been opening access in recent months to more businesses within our initial test markets, the Philippines and Mexico, and have seen strong usage with millions of conversations between people and business AIs taking place since July. This month, we expanded availability within WhatsApp and Messenger to all eligible businesses in Mexico and the Philippines, respectively.

In the U.S., we're also starting to roll out the ability for merchants to add their business AIs to their website so we can support the full sale funnel from ad to purchase. Next, I would like to discuss our approach to capital allocation. Our primary focus is deploying capital to support the company's highest order priorities, including developing leading AI products, models, and business solutions. As we make significant investments in infrastructure to support this work, we are focused on preserving maximum long-term flexibility to ensure we can meet our future capacity needs while also being able to respond to how the market develops in the years ahead. We're doing so in several ways, including staging data center sites so we can spring up capacity quickly in future years as we need it, as well as establishing strategic partnerships that give us option value for future compute needs.

The strong financial position and cash generation of our business enable us to make these investments while also accessing additional pools of cost-efficient capital. Moving to our financial outlook, we expect Q4 2025 total revenue to be in the range of $56 billion-$59 billion. Our guidance assumes foreign currency is an approximately 1% tailwind to year-over-year total revenue growth based on current exchange rates. Our outlook reflects an expectation for continued strong ad revenue growth, partially offset by lower year-over-year Reality Labs revenue in Q4. The anticipated reduction in Reality Labs revenue is due to us lapping the introduction of Quest 3S in Q4 of last year, as well as retail partners procuring Quest headsets during Q3 of this year to prepare for the holiday season, which were recorded as revenue in the third quarter.

Turning to the expense and CapEx outlooks, I'll first start with 2025 before providing some commentary on our planning for 2026. We expect full-year 2025 total expenses to be in the range of $116 billion-$118 billion, updated from our prior outlook of $114 billion-$118 billion and reflecting a growth rate of 22%-24% year-over-year. We currently expect 2025 capital expenditures, including principal payments on finance leases, to be in the range of $70 billion-$72 billion, increased from our prior outlook of $66 billion-$72 billion. On to tax. Absent any changes to our tax landscape, we expect our Q4 2025 tax rate to be 12%-15%.

Turning now to 2026, we are at an exciting point for our company, where we have continued runway to improve our core services today, as well as the opportunity to build new AI-powered experiences and services that will transform how people engage with our products in the future. We expect the set of investments we're making within our ads and organic engagement initiatives next year will enable us to continue to deliver strong revenue growth in 2026, while our progress on AI models and products will position us to capitalize on new revenue opportunities in the years to come. A central requirement to realizing these opportunities is infrastructure capacity. 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 in 2026 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 ad technical talent in priority areas.

Finally, we continue to monitor active legal and regulatory matters, including the increasing headwinds in the EU and the U.S. that could significantly impact our business and financial results. For example, in the EU, we continue to engage constructively with the European Commission on our less personalized ads offering. However, we cannot rule out the Commission imposing further changes to that offering that could have a significant negative impact on our European revenue as early as this quarter. In the U.S., a number of youth-related trials are scheduled for 2026 and may ultimately result in a material loss. In closing, this was another good quarter for our business. We have an exciting set of opportunities to continue improving our core business while delivering innovative new experiences and services for the people and businesses using our products in the years to come. With that, Krista, let's open up the call for questions.

Thank you. We will now open the lines for a question and answer session. To ask a question, please press star one on your touchtone phone. To withdraw your question, again, press star one. Please limit yourself to one question. Please pick up your handset before asking your question to ensure clarity. If you are streaming today's call, please mute your computer speakers. Your first question comes from the line of Brian Nowak with Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.

Thanks for taking my questions. I have two for Susan. The first one, Susan, the pipeline for core improvements to come in 2026 with models and ad ranking models and more types of compute seems very exciting, and the infrastructure build seems sizable behind that. Can you help us a little understand some of the early quantifiable signals you're seeing on A/B tests from some of these improvements to come that make you most excited and give you confidence you're going to get ROIC from all this CapEx? That's the first one. The second one's a little faster. How large is the Reality Labs revenue headwind in the 4Q guidance? Thanks.

Thanks, Brian, for the question. I think your first question had a couple parts to it, so I'm going to try to disaggregate those parts and let me know if this addresses what you're getting to. I will say that the growth in 2026 CapEx relative to 2025 comes from growth in each of the core areas: MSL, core AI, as well as non-AI spend. All of those areas are growing, but the MSL AI needs are growing the most. In terms of the core AI pipeline, I think we talked about last year when we were going into the 2025 budget process, we had a roadmap of resource investments across both headcount and compute that we thought would pay off in 2026. It's really a very broad range of different ads ranking and performance efforts.

We're continuing to see that those have paid off through the course of the year. There is a long list of specific efforts, but one of the measures that we look at to monitor this is how are we driving ad performance? How are conversions growing? Conversions is a complex metric for us because advertisers optimize for so many different conversions on different values. When we control for that and look at value-weighted conversion rates, we're seeing very strong year-over-year growth, and weighted conversions continue to grow faster than impressions. We also talked about some of the new model architecture over the course of the year and the degree to which the new model architecture is enabling us also to take advantage of having more data and more compute to drive ads performance. We expect that that's going to be a continued story in 2026.

We are, in fact, at the beginning of our 2026 budgeting process now, and we see a similar list of revenue investments that we're excited to be able to invest in. We think that that's going to be a big part of our ability to continue to drive strong revenue performance throughout the year. On your second question, which is the Reality Labs revenue headwind, I don't think we have quantified the exact size of that. We expect that Q4 Reality Labs revenue will be lower than last year for a couple of reasons that I alluded to. The biggest factor is we're lapping the introduction of Quest 3S in Q4 of last year, and we don't have a new headset in the market this year. We also recorded all of our holiday-related Quest 3S sales in Q4 2024 since the headset was launched in October 2024.

This year, we're recognizing some of those Quest 3S sales in Q3 as retail partners have procured Quest headsets in advance of the holiday season. We're still expecting significant year-over-year growth in AI glasses revenue in Q4 as we benefit from strong demand for the recent products that we've introduced, but that is more than offset by the headwinds to the Quest headsets.

Your next question comes from the line of Doug Anmuth with JPMorgan. Please go ahead.

Great. Thanks for taking the question. I appreciate the strategy to front-load capacity for superintelligence. Can you just talk about your thought process in kind of triangulating the CapEx dollar growth and the significantly faster expense growth next year with core growth in the business, then the impact on earnings and free cash flow? Do you have targets that we should be thinking about for cash on hand or net cash overall? Thanks.

Thanks, Doug. We're right now, I would say, in the process of—we're relatively early, actually still in the process of putting together our budget for 2026. It is, on the capacity side, a particularly dynamic process. We're certainly seeing that we wish we had more capacity today than we do. We would be able to put it towards good use. Certainly, not only would the MSL team appreciate having more capacity, but we'd be able to put it towards good and ROI positive use in the core business as well. We're really trying to plan ahead not only to ensure that we have the capacity we need in 2026, but also to give ourselves the sort of flexibility and option value to have the capacity that we think we could need in 2027 and 2028. That said, there are lots of moving pieces in the budget.

It's not baked yet. It's still sort of in the process of coming together. We don't have specific targets to share, but we do feel like our strategic priority is really making sure that we have the compute that we need to be well positioned to succeed at AI. That's sort of the foremost priority as we're putting together the budget.

Yeah, I mean, I'll add a few thoughts on this too, although, as Susan said, we're still working through the actual budget, and I think we'll typically have more to share on that early next year. To date, we keep on seeing this pattern where we build some amount of infrastructure to what we think is an aggressive assumption, and then we keep on having more demand to be able to use more compute, especially in the core business in ways that we think would be quite profitable than we end up having compute for.

I think that suggests that being able to make a significantly larger investment here is very likely to be a profitable thing over some period because the primary use of it is going to be to accelerate the AI research and the new AI work that we're doing and how that relates to both the core business and new products. Any compute that we don't need for that, we feel pretty good that we're going to be able to absorb a very large amount of that to just convert into more intelligence and better recommendations in our family of apps and ads in a profitable way. Of course, it's possible to overshoot that, right? If we do, this is what I mentioned in my comments, then we see that there's just a lot of demand for other new things that we would build internally, externally.

Almost every week, people come to us from outside the company asking us to stand up an API service or asking if we have different compute that they could get from us. We haven't done that yet, but obviously, if you got to a point where you overbuilt, you could have that as an option. The very worst case would be that we effectively have just pre-built for a couple of years, in which case, of course, there would be some loss and depreciation, but we'd grow into that and use it over time.

My view on this is that rather than continuing to be constrained on CapEx and feeling in the core business like we have significant investments that we could make that we're not able to make that would be profitable, the right thing to do is to try to accelerate this to make sure that we have the compute that we need both for the AI research and new things that we're doing and to try to get to a different state on our compute stance on the core business. That's kind of how I'm thinking about that overall. Of course, there's a lot of operational constraints too on what one can build, right? We are basically trying to work through this all, and I think we'll have more to share in the coming months and over the course of next year.

I think that there's just a huge, huge amount of opportunities ahead here.

Your next question comes from the line of Eric Sheridan with Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.

Thanks so much for taking the question. Mark, I wanted to reflect on some of your comments with respect to scaling towards superintelligence and bringing it back to consumer AI. Maybe reflect a little bit on the signals you've gotten on the way consumers across family of apps interact with Meta AI today and how you think about scaling and exiting models from the superintelligence effort might change the utility and behavior around Meta AI in the years ahead. Thanks.

Yeah, I mean, a lot of people use Meta AI today. As I said in my comments up front, there's more than a billion people who use it on a monthly basis. What we see is that as we improve the quality of the model, primarily for post-training Llama 4 at this point, we continue to see improvements in usage.

Our view is that when we get the new models that we're building in MSL in there and get truly frontier models with novel capabilities that you don't have in other places, then I think that this is just a massive latent opportunity. We know, I mean, I would guess that Meta I think has the best track record of any company out there of taking a new product that people love and getting it to billions of people in terms of usage. I think that the ability to plug in leading models is going to, I would predict, lead to a very large amount of use of these things over the coming years. I'm very excited about that in terms of new products. It's not just Meta AI as an assistant.

I think that there are going to be all kinds of new products around different content formats, and we're starting to see that with video and content creation. I think there's going to be a lot more like that that I'm quite excited about. There are the business versions of all of these too, like Business AI. Of course, one part of the story is the new things that will be possible to build. The other part is how more intelligent models are just going to improve the core business and improve the recommendations that we make across the family of apps and improve the recommendations and advertising. I think that there's just a, as we've shown, there's sort of this very large amount of headroom, and the opportunity there keeps growing as we are improving and optimizing the AI there.

I think that really shows no sign of being near the end. I think that there's quite a bit more to do there. Like I said in response to the last question, 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've built up. We really are taking a lot of the resources and using them to advance future things that we're doing. 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.

Your next question comes from the line of Mark Shmulik with Bernstein. Please go ahead.

Yes, hi. Thanks for taking the questions. Susan, as you think about the visibility into kind of the runway next year of continued ad performance and engagement improvements, how do you think about kind of the scale of those improvements versus kind of the progress we've seen over the last two years? Mark, as you think about kind of the timing of some of these newer efforts coming out of Superintelligence Labs, is us anchoring to kind of an updated frontier model launch sometime next year like the right way for us to think about it? Should we be looking at kind of progress from new products you're excited to see ship like Vibes? Thank you.

Thanks, Mark. On the sort of ads improvement side, some of the innovations that we have been launching actually involve improving our larger scale models. We don't use our larger model architectures like GEM for inference because their size and complexity would make it too cost-prohibitive. The way that we drive performance from those models is by using them to transfer knowledge to smaller, lightweight models that are used at runtime. In addition to the foundation model work, we are working on advancing our inference models by developing new techniques and architectures that then allow us to scale up compute and complexity in an ROI-positive way. In general, we obviously have a very large base of advertisers.

There's a lot of demand liquidity in the system, and even small scale improvements that we are able to make in terms of driving basis point improvements in the performance of ads or single-digit increases in conversions relative to impressions in a given quarter off of a large base mean that we're really able to continue to grow the absolute dollars of revenue growth in a pretty meaningful way.

Your next question comes from the line of Justin Post with Bank of America. Please go ahead.

Hey, Justin, just give us one second. I think there was a second part of Mark's question that we just want to get to on MSL.

I'll keep it quick. I don't think we have any specific timing to announce certainly on the models or products, but I expect that you will see both. We expect to build novel models and novel products, and I'm excited to share more when we have it.

Great, thanks. Mark, you mentioned the prior two content cycles, and obviously, you've been able to generate very attractive margins on them. As we get into the AI cycle, obviously, some concerns on the investment. Can you talk a little bit about how you're thinking about tools that could be coming out for users? I know there's some new competition. Secondly, how do you think about margins in this content cycle? Any reason to think they would be different versus prior cycles? Thank you.

I think it's too early to really understand what the margins are going to be for the new products that we build. I think certainly each product has somewhat different characteristics, and I think we'll kind of understand how that goes over time. My general goal is to build a business that maximizes value for the people who use our products and maximizes profitability, not margins.

I think we'll kind of just try to build the best things that we can and try to deliver the most value that we can for most people.

Your next question comes from the line of Ross Sandler with Barclays. Please go ahead.

Great. Hey, Mark, some of the goals for competing AI labs are around achieving AGI or these other milestones that are kind of like out there and a little esoteric. How are you setting up your new team in terms of achieving those types of goals versus products that can generate revenue from Meta kind of right out of the gate? Is the goal that you had articulated to us previously around giving billions of people kind of a personal AI to use still the direction of travel that you see, or are there other things like kind of this Vibes or Sora angle that you think are potentially important? How should we think about the overall direction? Thank you.

Meta Platforms (META) Q3 2025 Earnings Call Transcript

Company Participants