MENLO PARK, Calif., July 12 — The week ending March 7, 2025, marked a turning point for Meta Platforms Inc., as the company’s stock posted its best weekly gain since early 2024, climbing 15 percent. Shares closed at $485.32 that Friday, up from $422.00 just seven days earlier. For investors, the surge was a clear vote of confidence in the company’s artificial intelligence strategy.
The rally was fueled by optimism around Meta’s open-source large language model, Llama, and its expanding investments in AI-powered advertising tools. CEO Mark Zuckerberg, speaking on the company’s February 2025 earnings call, told analysts that artificial intelligence would be Meta’s “biggest investment area” for the year.
The company has backed that statement with projected AI-related spending of $35-40 billion in 2025. Meta reported $134.9 billion in revenue for fiscal year 2024, a 22 percent increase year-over-year. The company employed more than 72,000 people as of December 2024.
Behind the numbers is a sweeping push to embed AI across its platforms. The Llama 3 model was released in July 2024, and AI chatbots now operate on Facebook and Instagram.
The company’s AI Research SuperCluster, or RSC, launched in January 2022, provides the computing backbone for much of this work.
Wall Street takes notice
Analysts at Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs raised their price targets for Meta stock in early March 2025, citing AI-driven revenue growth as a key factor. The upgrades added momentum to a week that already saw the stock surge on investor enthusiasm. For a company that began life as a social networking site in a Harvard dorm room, the shift toward artificial intelligence as a primary growth engine represents a significant evolution.
The stock’s performance that week reflected a broader reassessment of Meta’s place in the AI landscape. While competitors have poured resources into proprietary models, Meta has taken a different approach with Llama, releasing it as open-source software.
That strategy has attracted developers and researchers who might otherwise work with models from other tech giants, and it has positioned Meta as a player in the AI infrastructure space.
What the AI push means
For advertisers, Meta’s AI-powered tools promise more targeted campaigns and better returns on spending. The company has been integrating machine learning into its ad platform for years, but the latest investments accelerate that process. For users, AI chatbots on Facebook and Instagram offer new ways to interact with the platforms, though the company has been careful to frame these features as enhancements rather than replacements for human connection.
The RSC, which Meta describes as one of the fastest AI supercomputers in the world, underpins much of this work. Launched in January 2022, the system was designed to train large models more efficiently, and it has been central to the development of the Llama family of models.
The Llama 3 release in July 2024 marked a significant step forward in capability, though the company has not disclosed specific performance benchmarks.
Looking ahead
With $35-40 billion earmarked for AI spending this year, Meta is betting heavily that artificial intelligence will drive its next phase of growth. The revenue figures from 2024 suggest the strategy is already paying off, and the stock market’s reaction in early March 2025 indicates that investors are watching closely. Whether the company can maintain that momentum will depend on how well it translates its AI investments into products that users and advertisers actually want.
For now, the numbers tell a clear story. A 15 percent weekly stock gain, upgrades from major Wall Street banks, and a CEO who has made AI his top priority all point to a company in the midst of a transformation.
The question is not whether Meta is investing in artificial intelligence — it clearly is — but whether those investments will continue to deliver the kind of returns that sent the stock soaring that week in March.
