How Meta Platforms is Capturing Investor Interest with AI as Other Techs Giants Struggle
Meta Platforms seem to be thriving as other US tech giants struggle to find a footing in 2025. According to Yahoo Finance, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft fell below analyst cloud revenue projections in their quarter four earnings. Tesla’s earnings report was disappointing and Apple’s revenue from iPhone sales.
Focus on Growth
Unlike its counterparts, Meta stocks have gained 24% since the beginning of the year. This is not the case for other big techs. Other than Amazon stocks which have gained 4.3% this year, the poor quarter four earnings reports have caused stocks of other big techs to dip. Since the start of 2025, Microsoft and Google stocks have dropped by 2.9% and 2.7% respectively.
Tesla stocks have lost 17% of their value while Apple shares have declined by more than 5%. Meta Platform’s stock performance is not driven by the large investments that its rivals in the AI race are making. Rather, it’s driven by the company’s intentional strategy of investing in its growth. As other US big techs spend more towards attracting customers, Meta is spending on aspects that drive its growth.
“I think Meta may actually be the most consequential company of our time right now, and I think it’s because they are the ultimate customer zero. Nothing they are doing as a hyperscale is merely for the sake of reselling to others,” Futurum Group CEO Daniel Newman said.
Meta plans to spend between $60 billion and $65 billion in AI capital investments in 2025. Microsoft and Google will be investing more, $80 billion and $75 billion in the technology. Amazon’s capital spending is expected to surpass the $100 billion mark.
Open Source AI
Wall Street investors are also attracted to the possibilities that Meta’s open source AI models present as the company builds an AI standard. But even as Meta makes its software access free, there are various limits to how users access it. For instance, the company only gives 700 million users access to the Llama service each month.
“You could definitely see how all these companies that are going to use Llama as a base model that could, through licensing, become a really big revenue stream in the future,” Newman added.
Zuckerberg appears keen on making Meta’s next-generation open source AI model, Llama 4 the industry leader.
“Llama 4 will be natively multimodal — it’s an omni-model — and it will have agentic capabilities, so it’s going to be novel and it’s going to unlock a lot of new use cases. I’m looking forward to sharing more of our plan for the year over the next couple of months,” he said during the Q4 earnings call.
Driving Business
The other reason why AI investments are having a positive impact on Meta stock prices is because the expenditure benefits the social media giant’s sales and rewards users for the time they spend on the platform.
“They’ve used their AI investments largely to drive their business where other companies have been trying to be a little bit more all things to all people,” ZK Research Principal Analyst Zeus Kerravala said.
Meta has adopted a clear strategy that generates early results. During the Q3 earnings call last October, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that AI was impacting every aspect of the social media company’s work.
“Improvements to our AI-driven feed and video recommendations have led to an 8% increase in time spent on Facebook and a 6% increase on Instagram this year alone,” Zuckerberg said.
CFO Susan Li further said that at least four million advertisers frequently use Meta’s AI tools to create ads during the Q4 profit call. This is a sharp increase from the 1 million advisers that used the tools six months ago. These real-world use cases make it easier for Meta to sell AI to investors.
“Meta is just so much more straightforward,” Moor Insights and Strategy CEO Patrick Moorhead explained.
This does not mean that the other big techs are not realizing positive traction with their AI investments. However the path that these tech companies have taken in setting up AI infrastructure and getting customers to sign up for their AI platforms is not as clear as Meta’s.
“Hyperscalers have all talked about services leveraging AI that they’re offering on their own. I just think that Meta doesn’t have the distraction of selling their computing services,” Bob O’Donnell, Founder of TECHnalysis Research said.
