Meta Burns Hundreds Of Trillions For Super Smart AI, But Luckily It's Still Dragged!

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta Platform Inc. (photo: x @ElonMuskNews47)

JAKARTA - Meta, a technology company owned by Mark Zuckerberg, is undergoing an ambitious year in the advanced artificial intelligence (AI) race. However, despite disbursing billions of dollars to captivate talent and build AI supercomputer infrastructure, analysts expect Meta's profit growth to slow down.

Meta is estimated to only record profit growth of 11.5% in the second quarter of 2025, to 15.01 billion US dollars (approximately IDR 246.1 trillion). This will be the slowest profit growth rate in the last two years, as operating costs increase by nearly 9%.

Zuckerberg has started a talent war with companies like OpenAI, even recruiting young CEO Scale AI, Alexandr Wang, in an investment of USD 14.3 billion. On the other hand, Meta has also laid off mass layoffs as part of savings. Its ambition at AI even surpassed previous strategies in virtual reality, which since 2020 has burned more than USD 60 billion.

However, the big Meta language model, Llama 4, is considered less impressive, prompting the company to establish a new Super Intelligence Lab just last month that will work parallel to the company's main AI research unit led by deep learning expert Yann LeCun.

Zuckerberg has committed to making super intelligence technology a concept where AI goes beyond human intelligence in every way as a consumer product, not just a company tool. Devices such as Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses are referred to as an entry route to this technology.

Meta is also expected to record revenue growth at its latest in the last seven quarters, only up 14.7% to 44.80 billion US dollars (approximately IDR 734.7 trillion). Even so, Meta's stock is still up more than 20% so far this year, signaling that investors still believe in Zuckerberg's long-term vision.

The company raised its capital expenditure last April and may increase it again. Alphabet, Google's parent, recently raised its annual capital expenditure projection by 13% to 85 billion US dollars, triggered by high demand for its AI-based cloud services.

"The increased capital expenditure is a positive thing, as Meta has the potential to become a service center for many marketing departments," said Ben Barringer, head of technology research at Quilter Cheviot, which owns Meta shares.

Tight Competition And TikTok Threat

Competition is also getting tighter. China is moving fast through AI models such as DeepSek, Alibaba Qwen, and Moonshot Kimi. Meanwhile, the main Meta ad market is facing pressure due to new tariffs from US President Donald Trump and the uncertainty of the ban on TikTok that seems to be failing to materialize.

Minda Total, senior analyst at eMarketer, said that although Meta managed to improve the performance of its advertising platform through AI, its efforts to compete with OpenAI directly still faced major challenges and needed huge funds.

With more than 3 billion social media users, Meta does have a strong base for implementing AI innovations. However, analysts from MoffettNathanson think the direction of Meta's strategy is not yet fully solid. LeCun itself is known to be skeptical of the large language model approach to achieving super intelligence.

"The current AI Meta strategy is indeed more integrated than 2023, but it is still felt that this company has not found a truly definite direction," they wrote.

With a lot of questions hanging about when super intelligence could actually be achieved, Meta is now facing great pressure to prove that their expensive ambitions are not just big dreams that are not necessarily profitable.