Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Mark Zuckerberg has pledged to spend “hundreds of billions” on artificial intelligence as he seeks to propel Meta to a dominant position in the industry this year, brushing off concerns about Chinese upstart DeepSeek.
“This is going to be a really big year,” Zuckerberg said in a call with investors after the group reported earnings late on Wednesday, adding that he had told staff: “This is going to be intense because we have about 48 weeks to get on the trajectory that we want to be on in AI.”
Meta’s shares were up 1.9 per cent in pre-market trading on Thursday in a sign of Wall Street’s confidence in the social media group’s robust advertising business, in spite of Zuckerberg’s plans to continue a spending spree on AI infrastructure.
The company topped analyst expectations in the fourth quarter, posting a 21 per cent rise in revenue to $48.4bn, and a nearly 50 per cent jump in net income to $20.8bn.
It comes as Meta has doubled down on its investment in AI to power its recommendations for its content feeds on Facebook and Instagram, and boost how brands can target users, in a boon to its advertising business.
On a call with analysts, Zuckerberg said he hoped his suite of longer-term AI bets would begin to pay off this year. He predicted Meta’s AI chatbot, which has 700mn monthly active users, and its open-source Llama models would become the most advanced and most widely used in a highly competitive field with rivals, including OpenAI and Microsoft.
Zuckerberg also brushed off concern that the unexpected release of a sophisticated open-source model by the start-up DeepSeek would threaten the company’s push to develop the global standard for open source. DeepSeek’s advancements sent shockwaves through US tech stocks, such as chipmaker Nvidia, on Monday, although Meta avoided the selling.
“There’s going to be an open-source standard globally . . . It’s important that it’s an American standard, so we take that seriously,” he said, adding: “Some of the recent news has only strengthened our conviction that this is the right thing for us to be focused on.”
However, he also acknowledged Meta would adopt some of the “novel” advances that its rival had achieved.
Zuckerberg is under pressure from investors to justify massive capital expenditures, which he said last week would be between $60bn and $65bn in 2025.
On Wednesday’s call, the company signalled it would consider allowing brands to pay to appear as its top recommendations as a way to monetise its AI chatbot, Meta AI, which it hopes will reach 1bn users by the end of the year. Among other ambitions, Meta wants to bring down computing costs by shifting in some cases to its own custom AI chips.
“Meta’s so-called year of efficiency (2023) has been trumped in 2025 with the year of ‘intensity’,” said Mike Proulx, research director at Forrester. “Mark Zuckerberg clearly set expectations that clarity will come to the trajectories of Meta’s long-term initiatives.”
“The wild card? DeepSeek,” he continued. “For Meta, this likely lights a fire atop of their already expected ‘intense’ year.”
Zuckerberg also said that 2025 was going to be a “big year for redefining our relationship with governments”, lavishing praise on the Trump administration as he continues to try to forge closer relations with the new president.
He said the US now had “an administration that is proud of our leading company, prioritises American technology winning, and that will defend our values and interests abroad”.
Donald Trump has previously railed against Meta for alleged censorship of conservative users. Separately on Wednesday, Meta confirmed it was paying about $25mn to settle a lawsuit filed by Trump against the company and Zuckerberg over its suspension of the president’s accounts in 2021. The Wall Street Journal first reported the settlement agreement.
