Meta’s share fell in value by about 15 percent on Thursday, after the technology giant announced expensive investments in artificial intelligence on Wednesday evening. In total, around 185 billion dollars (almost 173 billion euros) in stock market value evaporated. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has the ambition to make Meta the global market leader in the field of intelligence, and has decided to allocate additional billions for this in the coming years.
It is striking that the turnover of the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp actually increased by 27 percent last quarter to more than 34 billion euros. That was a larger increase than many market analysts had expected.
Zuckerberg labeled last year a “year of efficiency” after he cut ten thousand jobs (for the second year in a row). This frugality was well received on Wall Street: the value of the Meta share almost tripled in 2023, after having plummeted since the end of 2021.
Since last year, Zuckerberg has been under pressure to join competitors such as OpenAI, Microsoft and Alphabet in the race to the top of artificial intelligence. Investments in that technology are expensive, but the Facebook founder believes they will more than pay for themselves in the long term. Meta is integrating artificial intelligence into its existing products, for example by adding assistive AI chatbots to Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram.
To share
Email the editor
Tags: Meta loses billion announced investments
