Meta announced its financial results for the third quarter (Q3) of 2025 on 29 October. The company reported revenue of $51.24 billion, a 26% increase year-over-year.
However, the company’s expenses also increased by 32% year-over-year, totalling $30.71 billion.
“We expect full year 2025 total expenses to be in the range of $116-118 billion, updated from our prior outlook of $114-118 billion and reflecting a growth rate of 22-24% year-over-year,” said Susan Li, the CFO of the company.
Additionally, Meta recorded a nearly $16 billion one-time charge for the ‘One Big Beautiful Bill Act’ introduced by US President Donald Trump.
Without this fee, the company’s net income would be approximately $18,64 billion, compared to the reported $2.71 billion.
However, owing to this one-time charge, Meta said it expects a ‘significant reduction in our U.S. federal cash tax payments for the remainder of 2025 and future years.’
CEO Mark Zuckerberg described it as a ‘strong quarter’, revealing that 3.5 billion people are using at least one of Meta’s apps each day. Instagram has now surpassed 3 billion monthly active users, and Threads has exceeded 150 million daily active users.
“More than a billion monthly actives already use Meta AI, and we see usage increase as we improve our underlying models. I’m very excited to get a frontier model into Meta AI, and I think that the opportunity there is very large,” Zuckerberg said.
Over the past few months, Meta has made substantial investments in both talent and infrastructure to develop ‘superintelligence’ AI systems.
This involves Meta purchasing a 49% stake in the AI startup Scale AI for $14.3 billion and appointing its CEO, Alexandr Wang, to head Meta’s Superintelligence team. Besides, the company also reportedly shelled out lucrative pay packages exceeding $100 million to lure talent from other AI companies such as OpenAI, Google DeepMind and Anthropic.
Recently, the company also announced its 25th data centre in the United States, in El Paso, Texas. Once completed, it will represent an investment of over $1.5 billion and will have a capacity of up to 1 GW.
At a dinner gathering at the White House last month, Zuckerberg announced that the company would spend ‘at least’ $600 billion on US data centres and infrastructure through 2028.
Regarding the timelines for developing ‘superintelligent systems,’ Zuckerberg suggested that instead of focusing on a specific number of years, “I think it’s the right strategy to aggressively front-load building capacity so that way we’re prepared for the most optimistic cases.”
“That way, if superintelligence arrives sooner, we will be ideally positioned for a generational paradigm shift and many large opportunities,” he added.
Zuckerberg said that if it takes longer, excess infrastructure will be used to accelerate the core business. “And in the worst case, we would just slow building new infrastructure for some period while we grow into what we build.”
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