Meta First-Quarter Revenue Beats Estimates Amidst 'Burning Money' Anxiety, Drops 7% After Hours

Meta Platforms released strong first-quarter financial results on Wednesday, with revenue and profit exceeding expectations, but significantly increased its full-year capital expenditure guidance, reflecting its continued willingness to increase investments in artificial intelligence infrastructure.

Meta's daily active users (DAU) seemed to have experienced their first-ever decline in the first quarter. Meta attributed this to "internet disruptions in Iran and restrictions on WhatsApp access in Russia." Chief Financial Officer (CFO) Susan Li stated that without these issues, user growth would have been positive.

In the first quarter of 2026, Meta's total revenue reached $56.311 billion (analysts expected $55.51 billion), a year-over-year increase of 33%. Net profit reached $26.773 billion, a year-over-year increase of 61%, including a tax benefit of $8.03 billion.

Meta set its second-quarter total revenue guidance range at $58 billion to $61 billion (analysts expected $59.56 billion) and raised its full-year capital expenditure forecast to $125 billion to $145 billion, up from the previous range of $115 billion to $135 billion.

The company attributed the increase to higher hardware component prices this year and additional data center costs needed to support future capacity. This signal indicates that Meta's AI investment cycle is still in an accelerating phase, and capital consumption will continue to run at a high level in the short term.

Company CEO Zuckerberg stated that Meta completed a "milestone" quarter, with strong momentum in its various applications, and that Meta's Super Intelligence Laboratory has released its first model. "We are on track to provide personal super intelligence to billions of people."

Meta executives elaborated on the potential of AI agents in detail during the analyst call. Not only are employees using them internally to assist in building products and writing code, but Meta also believes that if excellent agents can be built, there will be significant commercial opportunities in the future.

It is currently unclear whether the layoffs Meta plans to conduct next month will be the last. CFO Susan Li stated that the company is still working on determining the appropriate scale. She did not explicitly state there would be more layoffs, but it sounds like there is still a lot of uncertainty about what artificial intelligence (AI) means for the company's future scale.