Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg introduces Muse, Meta’s artificial intelligence agent, at the Meta Connect event in Menlo Park, California, September 23, 2026.
Minh Connors | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Meta is expected to report third-quarter results 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 surveyed by LSEG expect:
- Earnings per share: $5.75
- Income: $63.2 billion
It was a big quarter for Mark Zuckerberg’s company due to the initial success of personal assistant tool Muse AI which debuted in September and rose to the top of Apple’s iOS app store. This AI momentum helped Meta finish 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 emails and search the web for headphone deals, but the company’s empire, which includes Facebook and Instagram, helped introduce AI agents to the masses. At the same time, Meta and its head of AI, Alexandr Wang, continued to rapidly roll out new foundation models and associated updates, including Muse Wonder, which was released last Monday.
Wall Street will likely be watching to see whether Meta plans to increase its data center capital spending, or investments, to further develop the underlying computing infrastructure needed to power AI agents and core models.
The company revealed in July during its second-quarter results that it had reduced its 2026 investment forecast to between $130 billion and $145 billion, representing an increase of $5 billion from the low end of its previous range. All of these expenses resulted in Meta’s free cash flow decreasing in the period to $784 million, compared to $8.55 billion in the same quarter a year ago.
Analysts expect Meta’s investments to reach $196.3 billion in 2027, according to FactSet.
Meta’s third-quarter daily active person, or DAP, number is expected to be 3.65 billion, according to StreetAccount, almost flat with the previous quarter. This figure represents all Meta users in its family of apps like Facebook and Instagram.
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