Meta Platforms posted first-quarter 2026 revenue of $43.4 billion and diluted earnings per share of $5.95 in results released Wednesday after the closing bell, beating the analyst consensus that Bloomberg had compiled at $42.6 billion and $5.20 respectively. Revenue grew 16 percent year-on-year and operating income climbed 24 percent to $17.9 billion, lifting the operating margin to 41 percent, the highest March-quarter margin Meta has reported.
The beat was almost entirely a Family of Apps story. Ad revenue across Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads reached $42.7 billion, with ad impressions up 6 percent and price-per-ad up 9 percent year-on-year, according to the company release. Daily active people across the family hit 3.55 billion, up from 3.49 billion at the end of Q4, with Threads crossing 380 million monthly active users for the first time.
Shares fell roughly 7 percent in after-hours trading and opened down 5.8 percent in Thursday’s New York session as the market digested a sharp upward revision to capex. Susan Li, Meta’s chief financial officer, told analysts the 2026 capital expenditure range now sits at $130-135 billion, up from the $115-125 billion guide Meta gave on the Q4 2025 call. The increase tracks higher H200 and B200 GPU procurement plus accelerated build-out at the Hyperion campus in Louisiana and the second Mesa, Arizona, data-center cluster.
The AI advertising flywheel is showing up in price
Mark Zuckerberg used the call to anchor the capex number to monetization that is already in the run rate. Meta’s Andromeda ranking stack, which migrated Reels and Feed prediction onto a unified retrieval-and-ranking pipeline last year, is now serving more than 90 percent of all delivered impressions across the family. Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns and the broader Advantage+ surface accounted for roughly 40 percent of total ad revenue in Q1, up from 32 percent in Q4 2025 according to the prepared remarks.
Analysts at Wells Fargo and Evercore ISI flagged in post-earnings notes that the 9 percent price-per-ad lift is the strongest non-holiday March-quarter print in three years and decouples Meta’s growth from impression supply, which is now scaling more slowly. JPMorgan’s Doug Anmuth raised his 2026 revenue estimate to $192 billion from $186 billion while trimming his price target by 4 percent on the higher capex number, a typical sell-side reaction that captures the market’s mixed read.
Reality Labs widens, and the $135B capex bar
Reality Labs revenue came in at $478 million, slightly ahead of consensus, but the operating loss widened to $5.1 billion as Meta accelerated Orion smart-glass tooling and the next Quest reference design. Cumulative Reality Labs losses since 2020 now exceed $74 billion. Li reiterated that the segment will not turn operating-profit-positive in 2026 and pointed to the Ray-Ban Display launch, which she said had shipped 920,000 units since November as the strongest near-term commercial signal.
The capex raise puts Meta’s 2026 spend roughly in line with Microsoft’s $115 billion and Alphabet’s $96 billion guides, and ahead of Amazon’s $125 billion. Combined hyperscaler capex for 2026 now sits above $470 billion on revised guidance, according to Reuters tallies. The four U.S. hyperscalers are absorbing close to 60 percent of Nvidia’s H200 and B200 backlog through 2027 based on supply allocations Counterpoint Research published earlier this month.
Llama 5 release dated, open-weight monetization question opens
Zuckerberg confirmed Llama 5 will release in two tracks during the third quarter — a frontier 700-billion-parameter dense flagship and a 35-billion-parameter on-device variant — with a new commercial license for hyperscaler partners that lifts the 700-million-MAU monetization clause that constrained Llama 3 and 4 distribution at AWS and Azure. The shift positions Llama as a paid model for cloud resale at meaningful scale for the first time, even as Meta keeps the weights downloadable.
Susan Li declined to put a near-term revenue line on the licensing program but said the early commercial conversations with three of the four U.S. hyperscalers had moved to commercial terms in March. The next read on the AI capex thesis lands tonight, when Apple and Amazon report after the closing bell. Meta’s print sets a high bar for ad-driven AI monetization; the cloud cohort now has to prove the same flywheel exists on the infrastructure side.
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