Meta’s Q4 earnings soar as CEO Zuckerberg hints at a ‘really big year’

Facebookparent Meta reported a surge in revenue and profit in the fourth quarter (Q4) of FY24, driven by strong digital advertising spend.

The California-based firm’s net profit surged 49% year-on-year to $20.8 billion, while its Q4 revenue reached $48.8 billion, up 21% from the same period last year.

For the full fiscal year, the social media giant reported a total revenue of $164.5 billion—a 22% annual growth. Its net profit for FY24 surged 59% to $62.4 billion compared to the previous year.

“We ended 2024 on a strong note,” said Mark Zuckerberg, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Meta, during the earnings call. “This is going to be a really big year.”

“We continue to make good progress on AI, glasses, and the future of social media. I’m excited to see these efforts scale further in 2025,” he noted.

Zuckerberg predicts that this year, a highly intelligent and personalised AI assistant will reach over 1 billion people, and he expects Meta AI to lead the way.

“We have a really exciting roadmap for this year with a unique vision focused on personalisation… I continue to think that this is going to be one of the most transformative products that we have made,” he added.

The Meta chief believes that 2025 could be the year Llama and open-source artificial intelligence (AI) models reach new heights and become the most advanced and widely used models.

Llama 4 will be natively multimodal and will have agentic capabilities, so it’s going to be novel and it’s going to unlock a lot of new use cases, he noted, adding that more details will be shared soon.

“In light of some of the recent news, the new competitor DeepSeek from China…one of the things that we are talking about is, there is going to be an open source standard globally,” Zuckerberg stated. “For our kind of national advantage, it’s important that it’s an American standard.”

“There’s a number of novel things that they did that I think we are still digesting. And there are a number of things that they have advances, that we will hope to implement in our systems,” the Meta chief said, answering a question about DeepSeek.

DeepSeek, a Chinese startup that’s shaking up the AI landscape. Its new AI models claim to be on par (or exceed) compared to some of the top AI models in the US.

AI spends

Tech giants like Meta, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon have been increasing their capital expenditure to expand their server and data centre infrastructure, driven by the exponential growth of AI and its demanding computational requirements.

Meta intends to pour hundreds of billions of dollars in AI infrastructure over the long term. 

“I announced last week that we expect to bring online almost 1GW of capacity this year, and we are building a 2GW and potentially bigger AI datacenter, so big that it would cover a significant part of Manhattan if it were placed there,” the Meta chief said.

Meta’s capital expenditures in Q4 and the full year 2024 are substantial, with $14.84 billion in Q4 and $39.23 billion for the year. Looking ahead, the company plans to ramp up its spending in 2025, expected to be in the range of $60-65 billion, Meta’s Chief Financial Officer Susan Li said, during the call.

“We expect capex growth in 2025 will be driven by increased investment to support both our generative AI efforts and our core business,” Li added.

Ads business

The Facebook and Instagram parent saw a 20.9% YoY growth in its advertising revenue—its main source of revenue—which increased to $46.8 billion in Q4 FY24. The revenue of the total family of apps touched $47.3 billion, which includes advertising revenue.

“We’ll learn what is going to happen with TikTok, and regardless of that, I expect Reels on Instagram and Facebook to continue growing,” Zuckerberg said.

Meta’s family of apps, which includes Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger, saw a 5% year-over-year increase in daily active users, reaching an average of 3.35 billion in December 2024.

Moreover, Reality Labs, which works on virtual reality and augmented reality gadgets and Meta’s metaverse vision, posted $1.1 billion in revenue in Q4, up 1% YoY driven by hardware sales. The unit’s operating loss stood at $5 billion.

Li explained that Reality Labs expenses were $6.0 billion, up 6% YoY driven primarily by higher infrastructure costs and employee compensation, partially offset by lower restructuring costs.

The social media giant ended the fourth quarter with 74,067 employees, up 10% YoY.

Li noted that in Q4, nearly 90% of YoY headcount growth was in R&D, with the rest mainly supporting data center operations.

“In 2025, we expect headcount growth will continue to be primarily driven by technical roles across our priority initiatives within infrastructure, monetisation, Reality Labs, generative AI, as well as regulation and compliance,” she noted, adding that Meta anticipate headcount growth in its business functions will remain “relatively limited”.

Earlier this month, it was reported that Meta plans to slash 5% of its workforce, targeting employees categorised as low performers.

Meta expects full year 2025 total expenses to be in the range of $114-119 billion. Li stated that in 2025, infrastructure costs will be the largest driver of expense growth, followed by employee compensation as Meta hires technical talent in key areas.

The social media company expects first quarter 2025 total revenue to be in the range of $39.5 to $41.8 billion. Meta’s Q1 revenue in FY24 was $36.5 billion. A midpoint of the forecast, $40.6 billion, would signify a 11.2% YoY growth.

“We have a compelling set of opportunities to invest in this year, which we expect will help us drive continued strong growth and develop transformative technologies that shape the future of our company and of the industry,” Li noted.