Meta Stock Price Forecast - META Near $661 Turns AI Capex and Threads Ads Into Its Next Upside Story

NASDAQ:META – AI SPENDING CYCLE, THREADS MONETIZATION AND THE VALUATION SETUP

NASDAQ:META price reset and where the stock stands now

NASDAQ:META is trading around $661–$662 today, after bouncing from a recent pullback and still below its 52-week high near $796. The stock has delivered roughly low-single-digit percentage gains over the last year, which is a clear underperformance versus the broader tech complex despite Meta still posting ~21% year-on-year revenue growth and running one of the highest-margin ad machines in the market. On current numbers the market is paying roughly 29x trailing EPS, about 22x forward earnings, and close to 11x EV/EBITDA, a discount to Meta’s own historical multiples while growth, profitability and balance sheet quality remain solid. The underperformance plus de-rated multiples are the starting point: you are buying a slowing but still compounding franchise, mid-20s revenue beats in 2025, and a very heavy AI capex cycle that is compressing free cash flow in the short term but is designed to widen the moat in the next decade.

NASDAQ:META earnings momentum – revenue beats and EPS pressure from AI capex

Meta went through 2025 with three consecutive quarters of accelerating revenue growth, moving from roughly 16% to 22% to 26% year-over-year, and has a track record of beating Street expectations on both revenue and earnings for more than 10–13 quarters in a row. For the upcoming Q4 print, consensus is looking for around 21% revenue growth and EPS of roughly $8.16, only ~2% above last year. That EPS profile is deliberately conservative: it assumes that AI data center spending, higher depreciation and premium AI talent compensation eat most of the operating leverage from the top-line acceleration. A more realistic scenario is that Meta still delivers EPS closer to the high-$8s (around $8.50), with margins down versus the peak but not collapsing the way the more bearish models imply. The important point: the earnings story is currently being dominated by accounting drag (depreciation ramp) rather than a collapse in the underlying unit economics of the ad business.

NASDAQ:META margin mechanics – depreciation, AI infrastructure and near-term free cash flow compression

Depreciation and amortization have been rising quarter after quarter as Meta builds out AI-optimized data centers and a significantly larger GPU fleet. That trend continues in 2026: more AI capex today means a heavier depreciation charge running through the P&L over the next several years, which mechanically pushes down operating margin and EPS even if revenue per impression and engagement are healthy. Free cash flow margins are expected to drop into the low-teens neighborhood (around ~11% in 2026) before re-expanding toward 25%+ by the end of the decade as capex normalizes and the new AI-driven revenue streams scale. The market’s discomfort is simple: investors hate the optical hit to free cash flow when the payoff is a few years away and not fully quantified. The key question is whether this is another “metaverse overspend” or a deliberate build-out of AI plumbing that will feed directly into the core ads engine and into new products like Threads, business messaging, wearables and future AR/VR devices.

NASDAQ:META core ad engine – Reels, Instagram and Facebook still printing cash

Behind the AI noise, the core business is still working. Facebook and Instagram together serve more than 3 billion monthly active users, and Meta has managed to turn what was once an Apple privacy shock into a competitive advantage by using AI to rebuild targeting signal and improve conversion measurement. Reels is now responsible for more than half of Instagram ad impressions, an important datapoint because short-form video was originally seen as a revenue drag versus legacy feed ads. AI-driven ranking has allowed Meta to increase time spent in Reels while pushing more relevant ads, improving revenue per minute and restoring monetization parity. At the same time, average price per ad, which collapsed during the 2022 reset, has been recovering as advertiser demand follows performance. For a performance marketer, Meta’s ROAS is again competitive or superior to most alternatives, which is exactly what you want to see when worrying about “AI ROI” – the first tangible payback of the AI spend is that the existing $200bn-scale ad machine is more efficient and harder to displace.

NASDAQ:META Threads – from user scale to a $10–13 billion incremental revenue lever

Threads has quietly become a real asset. Starting from a massive Instagram-fueled launch in 2023, it has climbed to roughly 400 million monthly active users and more than 150 million daily active users. Management originally said monetization would only start once there was a clear path toward 1 billion users; the decision to roll out global Threads advertising now signals that Meta believes engagement is durable and the product has passed the “toy” stage. Early tests already showed that AI recommendation systems can push around 10% more time spent on Threads – double the uplift seen on Facebook – which is exactly the behavior advertisers want to see. Because Threads ads are being plugged directly into the existing Facebook/Instagram ad stack, the incremental engineering cost is low: Meta is reusing the same bidding, targeting, and creative delivery infrastructure. Based on current reach, a reasonable, conservative assumption is that Threads can contribute on the order of $10–13 billion in annual ad revenue at scale, roughly ~7% of Facebook+Instagram reach, which would add around 600–700 bps to Family of Apps revenue growth versus a no-Threads scenario. That is a material growth and operating leverage tailwind on top of the current base, and it directly improves the perceived return profile of Meta’s AI investments.

NASDAQ:META AI strategy – from internal productivity to products, without a classic cloud business

One reason the stock has underperformed is skepticism about Meta’s position versus other AI heavyweights that own full cloud stacks. Unlike Amazon, Microsoft or Alphabet, Meta does not sell general-purpose cloud compute; its AI infra is aimed at powering its own apps and selectively exposing models through partners. That makes the path from AI spend to incremental revenue less “clean” in investors’ models. However, AI is already deeply embedded into Meta’s operations: ranking feeds, personalizing Reels, improving click-through and conversion rates, moderating content, and now powering on-device assistants and creator tools. The company is deploying large foundation models across its own family of apps and into hardware like Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, where voice and vision models can turn time-spent in the physical world into data and engagement that feeds back into the ecosystem. The strategic bet is that owning some of the best recommendation, vision and language models at massive scale, combined with unique first-party data and closed-loop conversions, will strengthen the moats around its ads, social graph and future hardware experiences even without selling infrastructure as a service.

NASDAQ:META capital intensity – power deals, nuclear exposure and Middle East financing angles

AI infrastructure is not just GPUs and buildings; it is increasingly about electricity and long-term power procurement. Meta is signing multi-decade energy agreements, including nuclear-adjacent and low-carbon sources, to secure the terawatt-hours needed for AI data centers at predictable cost. That matters because regulators are already signaling that the burden of AI-driven power demand should not fall on retail consumers; companies that secure cheap, reliable power ahead of rivals will have a structural margin advantage. On top of that, Meta has brought in high-level political and financial expertise – for example, senior hires with deep Middle Eastern deal-making experience – to pursue sovereign and regional capital partnerships. Structuring data centers and AI infra with external capital reduces the burden on Meta’s own balance sheet while preserving operational control, which is exactly the kind of financial engineering that can narrow the gap between GAAP capex pain today and free cash flow yields that equity holders see over time.

NASDAQ:META revenue mix, valuation and upside scenarios into 2030

On the numbers, the market is discounting a slowdown but not a collapse. At around $661, NASDAQ:META trades at approximately 21–22x 2025–2026 earnings and about 11x EV/EBITDA, vs significantly higher multiples in past cycles when growth was similar or only modestly higher. Free cash flow margins are modeled to trough just under 11% in 2026 and then climb to 25%+ by 2030 as capex stabilizes while revenue from AI-enhanced ads, Threads, business messaging and hardware scales through an already-built infra base. Under a conservative revenue path – low-teens CAGR for earnings into the back half of the decade – a multiple in the 22–24x range on 2027–2028 earnings is entirely reasonable for a $1.6–1.8 trillion platform still growing double digits with a clean balance sheet. That math supports fair value estimates clustering roughly in the $700–$800 band over a 2–3 year horizon, with more aggressive AI monetization and Threads outperformance justifying upside scenarios above that range. The current price in the low-$660s is not a distressed fire sale, but it embeds enough skepticism around AI ROI and regulatory risk that you are not paying peak multiples for a still-dominant franchise.

NASDAQ:META balance sheet, buybacks and capital returns

Meta carries a very strong net cash position relative to its obligations, which gives it flexibility to absorb heavy AI capex without compromising solvency or needing to issue dilutive equity. The company is also running a large and active share repurchase program, which is particularly powerful during periods of multiple compression: every dollar of buyback at 22x forward earnings cancels more future claims on cash flow than it does at 30x+. The dividend yield around 0.3% is symbolic rather than central to the thesis; Meta remains fundamentally a growth and buyback story, not an income stock. The combination of internal reinvestment at high projected returns, opportunistic repurchases during sentiment dips, and optionality to dial buybacks up or down as AI infra spending crests gives management significant leverage over per-share earnings power through the cycle.

NASDAQ:META key risks – regulation, teen access, privacy and AI fatigue

Several risk vectors can change the calculus quickly. Ongoing global scrutiny around teen social media usage could translate into hard age-gating, reduced engagement from younger cohorts, or mandated design changes that compress time spent and ad load. Privacy regulation and platform changes (analogous to Apple’s past IDFA shock) can once again disrupt targeting and measurement, requiring another expensive rebuild of the ad tech stack. Political pressure around power consumption and AI safety may force slower AI rollouts or higher regulatory costs on new models and data centers. Competition is also not static: Alphabet, Amazon and Microsoft are all trying to push their own ad stacks deeper into commerce and content, while new AI-native platforms fight for creator and user attention. Any combination of these risks that slows revenue growth into mid-single digits while keeping AI capex elevated would break the current bull case and justify a materially lower multiple.

NASDAQ:META investment stance – Buy, with volatility and execution risk fully acknowledged

Putting all the pieces together – a stock at roughly $661 after a multi-month pullback, forward P/E in the low-20s, EV/EBITDA around 11x, Family of Apps still growing revenue in the 20% area, Threads adding a credible $10–13 billion incremental revenue trajectory, and a realistic pathway from ~11% to 25%+ free cash flow margins by 2030 – the balance of evidence points to NASDAQ:META as a Buy with a bullish medium-term bias. The position is not risk-free: expect sharp swings around earnings, AI spending headlines and regulatory newsflow, and be prepared for 15–20% drawdowns if sentiment turns against high-capex AI names. But on a 3–5 year view, the current valuation compensates for those risks: you are effectively paying a modest premium to the market for a structurally advantaged, founder-led platform with dominant distribution, proven AI execution in its core ad business, a new monetization lever in Threads, and significant optionality in wearables and future AR/VR. For an investor who can tolerate volatility and is willing to underwrite the AI infrastructure cycle, NASDAQ:META at current levels is better framed as a Buy on weakness than a name to avoid.

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