Meta optimistic about Muse, Meta Enterprise Platform returns

Meta said it will continue to invest heavily in AI infrastructure, but can't predict how efforts like Muse, Muse Wonder and Meta Enterprise Platform will juice growth beyond its core business.

The company said that capital spending for 2026 will be $135 billion to $145 billion, up from a range of $130 billion to $145 billion, and the company will continue to be an AI big spender in 2027. Meta added that it expects fourth quarter revenue of $73 billion to $76 billion.

Meta said it is working on its 2027 budget and capacity plans, but said it expects to "continue investing aggressively to support both our core business and emerging AI initiatives."

According to Meta, the company's "current capacity and what is scheduled to come online gives us the flexibility to allocate resources across model training, core business growth, and the development and support of new products."

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The company's third quarter earnings call was light on AI investment returns, but said the spending on new models is improving advertising revenue. Going forward, Meta said it expects Muse to be a monetization engine especially for shopping.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the following on Meta's core plans:

• "Now that Muse has clear product market fit, we are entering a new phase and a more operational phase that is focused on scaling it. The goals for this next phase play to many of Meta's strengths. We need to do three things: scale the product, grow revenue, and optimize compute costs. We expect to grow Muse to serve billions of people. This is both our mission and our strategy."
• "On the compute side, we are building out the capacity to serve more than a billion people over the next few years. Muse is very compute intensive to run, but we expect to improve its cost efficiency by more than 10x in the next year, which will enable it to be profitable once the revenue lines are at scale."
• Referring to Meta Enterprise Platform, Zuckerberg said "now that we have leading models we want to serve as much high margin inference as possible. That is why we are building Meta Enterprise Platform, Muse Wonder and even more advanced models."
• "It is difficult to forecast exact growth rates for enterprise platform and how Muse Wonder and beyond will accelerate our core."

Meta reported third quarter net income of $9.86 billion, or $3.83 a share, on revenue of $64.6 billion, up 26% from a year ago. The results included an $18.59 billion for a legal settlement with 52 attorney generals related to teen mental health and social media. Third quarter costs related to that settlement were $9.89 billion.

Excluding that charge, Meta would have reported earnings of $7.40 a share.

Meta added that it had 3.64 billion daily active people across its properties in September, up 3% from a year ago. Meta said headcount was 66,775 as of Sept. 30, down15% from a year ago.