Meta's advertising growth is proof that hefty AI spending is already paying off

For investors who are skeptical of Meta's massive spending on artificial intelligence and whether it will pay off anytime soon, CEO Mark Zuckerberg is urging them to look to the present.

After the company's better-than-expected second-quarter earnings report on Wednesday, Zuckerberg and finance chief Susan Li rattled off all the ways that AI has helped the company grow faster than the competition in the digital advertising market, Meta's core business.

"The ways that it's improving recommendations and helping people find better content, as well as making the advertising experiences more effective, I think there's a lot of upside there," Zuckerberg said on the earnings call. "Those are already products that are at scale. The AI work that we're doing is going to improve that."

Meta reported revenue growth of 22% from a year earlier to $39.07 billion, with 98% of its sales coming from advertising, primarily on Facebook and Instagram. Its growth rate was double that of Google's ad business, which saw sales increase 11% to $64.6 billion, Alphabet said in its earnings report last week.

Meanwhile, Pinterest and Spotify, which are both significantly smaller than Meta, reported revenue growth of 21% and 20%, respectively, in their latest reports.

As in previous quarters, Li said Meta's advertising business benefited from online commerce, gaming and the media and entertainment sectors, and that ad growth continued to be strongest in the Asia-Pacific region. She said the company's "improved ad performance" helped lift overall ad prices despite slowing growth in that region.

Zuckerberg pointed to AI as the foundation behind Meta's refreshed online advertising platform, which was battered after Apple introduced an iOS privacy update in 2021 that made it harder for social media companies to target users across the Internet.

"They rebuilt their ad tech stack using AI and they changed their user interface and generated a lot more user engagement because of AI," said Mark Mahaney, internet analyst at Evercore ISI, in an interview on CNBC's "Closing Bell: Overtime" on Wednesday. "It's showing up in the revenue and the profits now," said Mahaney, who recommends buying Meta shares.

Meta shares popped 7% in extended trading after Wednesday's earnings report, which included an uplifting forecast for the current quarter.

Like the other mega-cap tech companies, Meta is spending billions of dollars on Nvidia's graphics processing units (GPUs), which are needed to train AI models and run hefty workloads. Some industry experts have questioned the outlays because so much of the investment is tied to expectations that generative AI — popularized by OpenAI's ChatGPT — will lead to big revenue gains in the future.

Meta is showing that, while the bet is on major growth down the road, the company is reaping rewards today.

"You've already seen a return with Meta over the last two years," Mahaney said.

Angelo Zino, an analyst at CFRA Research, agreed with Mahaney, telling CNBC that Meta has "really navigated some of the concerns and the storms" from a couple years ago and is "clearly integrating AI across their ecosystem extremely nicely."

Zino noted that Meta's growth rates are "nicely outpacing those of its peers."

Meta isn't finished spending big money on AI and the far-flung metaverse, which continues to lose billions of dollars each quarter. Li said that Meta expects "significant CapEx growth in 2025 as we invest to support our AI research and our product development efforts."

For 2024, Meta said it now expects capital expenditures in the range of $37 billion to $40 billion, lifting the low end of that range, which had been $35 billion.

Li says investors should think of Meta's AI strategy as a two-pronged approach, with "core AI" helping Meta improve its advertising platform and recommendation system, thus leading to more user engagement and ad performance that "have translated into revenue gains."

Generative AI is a longer-term bet. Li said that the company doesn't "expect our Gen AI products to be a meaningful driver of revenue in '24, but we do expect that they're going to open up new revenue opportunities over time that will enable us to generate a solid return off of our investment."

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