Meta reports fourth-quarter earnings Wednesday, and Wall Street's got one question: will the company's billion-dollar AI gamble actually pay off? After spending much of 2025 overhauling its AI division - including a massive $14.3 billion investment in Scale AI to poach founder Alexandr Wang - investors are hungry for proof that CEO Mark Zuckerberg's bet on artificial intelligence is more than just expensive promises. With analysts expecting revenue of $58.59 billion and earnings of $8.23 per share, the real story isn't in the numbers but in what comes next.
Meta is about to show its hand. When the social media giant reports fourth-quarter results Wednesday after market close, investors won't just be scanning for revenue beats or user growth metrics. They'll be hunting for concrete evidence that Mark Zuckerberg's massive AI overhaul - the one that's been burning through billions - is actually starting to work.
The numbers Wall Street's watching are straightforward enough: analysts polled by LSEG expect earnings of $8.23 per share on revenue of $58.59 billion. Online advertising sales, still Meta's core business, should come in around $56.98 billion according to StreetAccount estimates. Daily active users across Meta's family of apps are projected to hit 3.58 billion.
But those familiar metrics mask what's really happening inside Meta. The company spent much of 2025 essentially ripping apart and rebuilding its entire AI operation. The centerpiece? A $14.3 billion investment in Scale AI that brought founder Alexandr Wang and his team into Meta's orbit. Wang now runs TBD, Meta's top-tier AI unit tasked with developing the kind of powerful models that can compete with OpenAI and Google.
The TBD unit exists because Meta needed a reset. When from developers, it became clear the company's AI strategy wasn't working. Now Meta's testing a new frontier model internally - code-named Avocado - that's supposed to leapfrog Llama entirely. the company plans to release Avocado during the first half of 2026.
