Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg demonstrates Muse, Meta’s artificial intelligence agent, during the Meta Connect event in Menlo Park, California, Sept. 23, 2026.
Minh Connors | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Meta is slated to report third-quarter earnings after the bell on Wednesday, and investors will be looking for signs that the company’s latest artificial intelligence efforts will bolster future sales.
Here’s what analysts polled by LSEG are expecting:
- Earnings per share: $5.75
- Revenue: $63.2 billion
It’s been a big quarter for Mark Zuckerberg’s company due to the initial success of the Muse AI personal assistant tool that debuted in September and shot to the top of Apple’s iOS app store. That AI momentum helped Meta end September with its best month on Wall Street since 2022.
Meta isn’t the first to create a digital assistant that can organize people’s email and scan the web for headphone deals, but the company’s empire, which includes Facebook and Instagram, has helped introduce AI agents to the masses. At the same time, Meta and its AI chief Alexandr Wang have continued rolling out new foundation models and related updates at a speedy clip, including Muse Wonder, which was released last Monday.
Wall Street will likely be monitoring for whether Meta plans to increase its data center-related capital expenditures, or capex, to further develop the underlying computing infrastructure needed to power AI agents and foundation models.
The company revealed in July during its second-quarter earnings that it narrowed its 2026 capex guidance to come in between $130 billion and $145 billion, representing a $5 billion increase to the low end of its prior range. All that spending resulted in Meta’s free cash flow in the period shrinking to $784 million from $8.55 billion in the same quarter a year earlier.
Analysts expect Meta’s capex to swell to $196.3 billion in 2027, according to FactSet.
Meta’s third-quarter daily active people, or DAP, is expected to come in at 3.65 billion, according to StreetAccount, almost flat from the prior quarter. That figure represents all of Meta’s users across its family of apps like Facebook and Instagram.
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