Shares of Facebook owner Meta Platforms (Nasdaq: META) are surging in premarket trading this morning after the company announced its fourth-quarter 2025 earnings yesterday afternoon.
The earnings not only exceeded investor expectations, but CEO Mark Zuckerberg also laid out his vision for how artificial intelligence is set to transform the company—and personal computing—in the years ahead. Here’s what you need to know.
Meta reports strong Q4 2025 earnings
Expectations for Meta’s Q4 2025 were relatively high, but when the company announced its latest quarterly earnings after the bell last night, they exceeded what most investors had hoped for.
Here are the key financials Meta reported:
- Quarterly revenue: $59.89 billion
- Earnings per share (EPS): $8.88
Quarterly revenue was a 24% increase from the same period a year earlier. As noted by CNBC, it also blew past LSEG analyst expectations of $58.59 billion. In other words, Meta brought in around $1.3 billion more than most people thought it would.
Thanks in part to its strong revenue, Meta also beat earnings per share (EPS) estimates. Most LSEG analysts had been expecting an EPS of $8.23. Meta beat that by 60 cents per share.
The company also revealed some other interesting metrics, most notably about its user base.
For the quarter, Meta reported a family daily active people (DAP) metric of 3.58 billion. “Family daily active people” is the term Meta uses to encapsulate how many individuals use its family of products on a daily basis.
Meta’s family of products includes Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Meta’s family DAP for the fourth quarter grew 7% year over year.
Looking ahead at the company’s financials, Meta said it expects its current first-quarter 2026 revenue to come in at between $53.5 billion and $56.5 billion. That’s significantly ahead of the $51.41 billion most analysts were expecting.
Zuckerberg tries to predict the future—again
Meta didn’t just reveal its financial metrics. Zuckerberg also spoke about the future of technology and the way artificial intelligence will both boost Meta’s business and change personal computing more broadly.
To the latter point, the chief executive said he believes AI-powered smart glasses will represent a paradigm shift in personal computing, likening the specs to the smartphone’s impact on computing, and saying glasses will be “the ultimate incarnation” of the device we use most efficiently to consume AI content.
“They’re going to be able to see what you see, hear what you hear, talk to you and help you as you go about your day, and even show you information or generate custom UI right there in your vision,” Zuckerberg stated in comments posted to Facebook.
“I think we’re at a moment similar to when smartphones arrived, and it was clearly only a matter of time until all those flip phones became smartphones,” he added. “It’s hard to imagine a world in several years where most glasses aren’t AI glasses.”
His statement here isn’t much of a surprise, however, considering how Meta has long worked on devices aimed at dethroning the smartphone as people’s personal computer of choice.
Meta first tried to do this with its virtual reality headsets and virtual “metaverse” world. These initiative were run by the company’s Reality Labs division. But early this month, Meta initiated massive layoffs at Reality Labs—and admitted that its VR product never caught on with the general public.
AI as an advertising booster
Any hardware that Meta makes still represents a minuscule part of Facebook’s revenues. The company is, after all, primarily an advertising company, not a hardware technology one.
Around 97% of its revenues are made from selling ads across its platforms.
Not surprisingly, Zuckerberg touched on how artificial intelligence would be a boost to its current ad business. The Meta CEO said that it was currently working on merging its LLMs with its ads system and said that its current “world class recommendation systems,” which its ads rely on, were still “primitive compared to what will be possible soon.”
As an example, Zuckerberg pointed out that Meta’s existing ad systems help businesses find the right, specific users who are likely to purchase their goods.
But thanks to AI, “New agentic shopping tools will allow people to find just the right very specific set of products from the businesses in our catalogue.”
It’s not the only way that Meta’s ad business stands to benefit from the artificial intelligence boom.
Meta, like many tech giants, is rushing to build out its personal data center capacity to run artificial intelligence tools on. By owning the data center directly, Meta and these other companies will be able to cut down on costs, which are currently paid to third-party data center owners.
As analyst firm MoffettNathanson pointed out in a research note on Thursday, Meta’s buildup of its own data centers could benefit its business.
“[Given] the AI capacity constraint facing the industry, Meta has been forced to use third-party cloud offering as their own data centers are not ready to move online yet,” the research firm noted. “Longer-term, these workloads should shift from 3rd party contracts to Meta’s own facilities which, we think, should produce margin leverage.”
Meta’s stock price jumps
Given Meta’s robust Q4 2025 results and a Q1 2026 forecast that beat what most analysts were expecting, it’s little surprise that the company’s stock price is surging in premarket trading this month.
As of this writing, shares of Meta Platforms (Nasdaq: META) are up around 8.8% to $668.73 per share.
In its Thursday note, MoffettNathanson maintained its “buy” rating for Meta’s stock and increased its price target to $810.
As of yesterday’s close, META shares had only increased about 1.3% year-to-date, according to Yahoo Finance data.
If the company’s premarket stock price gain holds when markets open, that will mean Meta’s stock has already surged 10% in the first month of 2026.
Today’s premarket gain also means that Meta’s stock price is now out of the red for the past year. As of yesterday’s market close, Meta’s stock was down about eight-tenths of a percent over the past year. That contrasts with the Nasdaq Composite’s broader gain of around 21% over the same period.