Meta (META) will report its second quarter earnings after the bell on Wednesday, giving Wall Street its latest look into the company's AI investments and whether they're paying off.
The announcement comes as Meta stock continues to struggle to regain its footing and investors question CEO Mark Zuckerberg's capex plans. The company has said it plans to spend upwards of $145 billion this year, with the bulk of that going to its data center build-out.
On Tuesday, Meta and BlackRock announced they are entering into an agreement to build a $14 billion, 1-gigawatt data center in Texas. BlackRock will hold an 80% stake in the site, while Meta will get the remaining 20%.
Shares of Meta are off nearly 10% year to date and roughly 16% over the last 12 months. Out of the "Magnificent Seven" stocks, only Microsoft (MSFT) stock has lagged more in the last year, dropping 24% on similar concerns about the company's AI spending.
But Meta has also given investors some hope more recently. Earlier this month, Zuckerberg told Bloomberg that it makes sense for the company to explore leasing out some of its data center capacity to customers.
It's not clear how Meta would structure any deals, but it could turn toward SpaceX (SPCX) for inspiration. That company has set up multibillion-dollar arrangements to rent access to its AI capacity to Anthropic (ANTH.PVT) and Google (GOOG, GOOGL).
Meta could also choose to operate similarly to a neocloud company like CoreWeave and simply rent out its hardware as is.
The company also debuted its new Musk Spark 1.1 model this month and revealed an aggressive pricing scheme that significantly undercuts the cost of using models from OpenAI and Anthropic.
Meta charges developers $1.25 per million input tokens and $4.25 per million output tokens. Anthropic currently charges $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens for its Opus 4.8 model, which Meta compares with Spark 1.1.
By setting prices so low, Meta could take market share from the big AI labs as price-conscious customers seek better deals on AI models.
For Q2, Meta is expected to report earnings per share of $7.14 on revenue of $60.23 billion, according to Bloomberg analyst consensus estimates. The company saw EPS of $7.14 and revenue of $47.51 billion in the same period a year ago. Advertising revenue is projected to come in at $58.99 billion, up 26% from the $46.56 billion the company brought in in Q2 2025.
Capex, however, is set to increase 100% to $33.15 billion for the quarter.
Email Daniel Howley at dhowley@yahoofinance.com. Follow him on X at @DanielHowley.
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