Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta Platforms, has put his weight behind the company’s artificial intelligence strategy, calling 2025 a “really big year” during the fourth-quarter earnings call on Wednesday and dismissed fears of overspending on the back of the rise of DeepSeek’s AI models.
The company posted $48.39 billion in fourth-quarter revenue (a 21-per cent increase from the year-ago period) and earnings per share of $8.02, beating Wall Street projections of $46.9 billion and $6.77 in earnings-per-share.
“I continue to think that investing very heavily in CapEx and infrastructure is going to be a strategic advantage over time,” Zuckerberg said days after Chinese company DeepSeek caused a massive sell-off in AI stocks due to fears that models will no longer need as much computing power.
“In AI, I expect that this is going to be the year when a highly intelligent and personalised AI assistant reaches more than 1 billion people,” the Facebook founder said. “And I expect Meta AI to be that leading AI assistant.”
Last week, Meta said its capital expenditure this year would total more than $60 billion to $65 billion on data centres and other infrastructure.
Meta has also agreed to pay $25 million to settle a lawsuit with US President Donald Trump for a suit that originated in 2021 when Trump sued the social media company for suspending his accounts after the January 6 attack on the US Capitol.