Wall Street can be pretty dramatic. Honestly, it’s like a high school lunchroom where everyone is whispering about who spent too much money on what. This past October, the spotlight was squarely on Meta.
When the Meta Q3 earnings 2024 report dropped, the numbers were actually stellar. We're talking about a massive revenue beat and profit margins that would make most CEOs weep with joy. But as soon as the call started, the mood shifted. Investors weren't looking at the cash coming in; they were staring at the cash going out.
Mark Zuckerberg is basically betting the entire house on AI. And it's a very, very expensive house.
The Numbers You Actually Care About
Let's cut through the corporate jargon. Meta pulled in $40.59 billion in revenue for the third quarter of 2024. That is a 19% jump from the year before. If you think about the sheer scale of Facebook and Instagram, growing by nearly 20% when you already basically own the internet is kind of insane.
Net income? Even crazier. It hit $15.69 billion, up 35%.
Most of this comes from the "Family of Apps." That’s the fancy way of saying Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp. Advertising is still the engine under the hood, and it is purring. The average price per ad went up by 11% this quarter. That matters because even though they aren't showing that many more ads (impressions only grew 7%), they are making way more money on the ones they do show.
Why Reality Labs is the "Money Pit" Everyone Talks About
If the Family of Apps is the high-earning older sibling, Reality Labs is the kid in college who keeps asking for "just one more" wire transfer.
Reality Labs—the division responsible for the Quest headsets and those slick Ray-Ban Meta glasses—lost $4.43 billion in just three months. This isn't a new trend, either. Since 2020, this specific wing of the company has burned through over $70 billion.
You’ve probably seen the glasses. People actually like them. Zuckerberg mentioned on the call that they are "selling well," and they've even had trouble keeping them in stock. But selling a few hundred thousand pairs of $300 glasses doesn't cover the multi-billion dollar bill for developing the future of computing.
Zuck's logic? He thinks glasses are the "ideal form factor" for AI. He wants you to have a digital assistant that sees what you see. It's a bold vision, but it's one that costs a fortune to build from scratch.
The AI Arms Race and the 100k H100s
The real meat of the Meta Q3 earnings 2024 discussion wasn't about the Metaverse. It was about Llama.
Meta’s open-source AI model, Llama, has become a bit of a cult hero in the dev world. Zuckerberg is obsessed with making it the industry standard. Why? Because if everyone builds on Meta's foundation, Meta controls the ecosystem.
During the call, Zuck dropped a bombshell about Llama 4. They are currently training it on a server cluster that uses more than 100,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs. For context, those chips cost about $30,000 a piece. You do the math. It’s a staggering amount of compute power, bigger than almost anything else being reported in the industry.
The Capex Problem
This brings us to "Capex," or capital expenditures. This is the word that made investors' stomachs turn.
- 2024 Spending: Meta raised its floor for capital spending to $38–$40 billion.
- The 2025 Outlook: They explicitly warned that spending will grow "significantly" in 2025.
- The Reason: You can't run world-class AI on a laptop. You need massive, power-hungry data centers.
Meta is building what they call "Titan Clusters." One of them, called Prometheus, is going up in Ohio and will use a full gigawatt of power. That’s enough to power roughly 700,000 homes.
Is the Ad Business Starting to Sweat?
Honestly, the ad business is the only reason Meta can afford this. But there are some tiny cracks.
Daily Active People (DAP) hit 3.29 billion in September. That’s a 5% increase. It sounds great until you realize Wall Street expected 3.31 billion. When you're this big, missing by a few million people makes people nervous. It signals that we might be reaching "peak social media." There just aren't many humans left on Earth who aren't already on a Meta platform.
Threads is a bright spot, though. It's up to 275 million monthly users, adding about a million a day. Zuck says he doesn't expect it to make "meaningful" money in 2025, which is a polite way of saying "don't expect ads there yet."
What This Means for You (The Actionable Part)
If you're an investor, a creator, or just someone who uses these apps, the Meta Q3 earnings 2024 results tell a very specific story.
- For Small Businesses: Ad costs are rising. With an 11% increase in the average price per ad, your marketing budget isn't going as far as it used to. You need to lean into AI-driven creative tools to keep your conversion rates high enough to justify the cost.
- For Tech Workers: Meta is hiring, but only in very specific areas. They added about 9% to their headcount this year, mostly in AI and infrastructure. If you aren't in those fields, the "Year of Efficiency" hasn't really ended.
- For Consumers: Expect your apps to get "smarter" (and weirder). Meta is integrating AI into everything from Instagram search to WhatsApp support. The goal is to keep you in the app longer so they can show you those high-priced ads.
The big takeaway? Meta is no longer just a social media company. It’s an AI infrastructure company that happens to own some social networks. Whether that $40 billion annual bill pays off depends entirely on whether Llama 4 is actually as "revolutionary" as Zuckerberg says it will be.
🔗 Read more: Flow Matching Mode Collapse: Why Your Generative Models Are Playing It Safe
Next Steps for Tracking Meta
To keep a pulse on where this is going before the next report, keep an eye on these three indicators:
- Nvidia's delivery timelines: If Meta can't get those 100k chips fast enough, Llama 4 slips.
- Ray-Ban Meta stock levels: If the glasses stay sold out, it proves there's a real market for wearable AI.
- Threads monetization talk: Watch for any "testing" of ads on Threads; that's the next big revenue lever.
The 2024 Q3 report proved Meta has the cash. Now they just have to prove the "superintelligence" they're building is worth the price of a small country's GDP.