Analysts lower Meta price targets after social media giant says AI capex will keep climbing

Meta may have posted record revenue Wednesday but the stock is deeply in the red in the wake of its third-quarter earnings report, after the social media company said that its capital expenditure on AI would continue to rise.

The earnings prompted a number of analysts to lower their price targets or downgrade the stock.

RBC Capital lowered its price target to $810 from $840. Bank of America Securities lowered its price target to $810 from $900. Barclays, JPMorgan, Deutsche Bank, and Wells Fargo also lowered their price targets on the company.

Earlier today, Benchmark downgraded its rating to a “hold” from a “buy.” Oppenheimer downgraded the company to “perform” from “outperform,” saying the “significant investment in Superintelligence despite unknown revenue opportunity mirrors 2021/2022 Metaverse spending.” Ouch.

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Jon Keegan

As public pushback against data centers grows, AI companies promise they’ll be good neighbors

Communities concerned with energy prices, pollution, and water usage are starting to push back on Big Tech’s AI data center building spree. The companies are trying to assure the public that they will pay their way.

Rani Molla4h

Morgan Stanley expects Tesla to have 1,000 Robotaxis by the end of 2026. Musk had predicted 1,500 by the end of 2025

Ahead of Tesla’s earnings report next week, Morgan Stanley has released a note estimating that the company will scale its Robotaxi fleet much more slowly than CEO Elon Musk has said. The firm thinks the automaker will have 1,000 vehicles in its Robotaxi service by the end of 2026 — 500 fewer than Musk estimated a few months ago Tesla would have by the end of 2025.

More key to Tesla’s success, however, will be removing the safety monitors from those rides, which Morgan Stanley says will be a “precursor to personal unsupervised FSD [Full Self-Driving] rollout.” Musk, of course, had also promised to remove safety drivers in Austin by the end of 2025, but driverless rides are still in the testing stage.

Rani Molla6h

Meta says it’s delivered new AI models internally this month and they’re “very good”

Meta’s last AI model release, Llama 4, was marred by delays and accusations of rigged benchmarks, but the company says the latest models built by its Superintelligence Labs team look promising. CTO Andrew Bosworth told reporters at the World Economic Forum that the team delivered new models internally in January and they’re “very good.”

Bosworth didn’t specify what the models are, though The Wall Street Journal has reported that Meta is working on a large language model and an AI image and video model code-named Avocado and Mango, respectively.

Exclusive: Meta's new AI team delivered first key models internally this month, CTO says

Rani Molla7h

Two charts that show why Amazon is building a giant physical store

This week Amazon received approval to build a hybrid big-box store and fulfillment center outside Chicago that’s roughly twice the size of a typical Target. Why would the e-commerce giant want to wade into a costly and cumbersome physical store, especially after earlier brick-and-mortar iterations like Amazon Go have failed?

There are at least two reasons. First, despite e-commerce’s rapid growth, the vast majority of retail purchases still happen in physical stores, according to Census Bureau data:

Second, Amazon’s own customers regularly shop at competing big-box retailers: Consumer Intelligence Research Partners found that 93% have also shopped at Walmart. And as Amazon pushes further into groceries — a category still dominated by in-person shopping — CIRP estimates that basically all Amazon customers buy groceries elsewhere.

Jon Keegan

See for yourself just how massive Meta’s Hyperion data center is

It’s hard to overstate just how massive Meta’s Richland Parish, Louisiana, data center site is. Use this tool to compare it to where you live.

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