Traders renew interest in Meta amid AI strategy and advertising growth

Meta just had the kind of week that makes portfolio managers forget about the metaverse years entirely. Shares of the social media giant climbed roughly 6% on July 10 and gained nearly 15% for the week, marking its strongest weekly performance since early 2024.

The catalyst? A combination of new AI product announcements and growing confidence that Mark Zuckerberg’s massive bet on artificial intelligence is about to start paying dividends.

New AI products, new revenue story

Meta unveiled two new AI products that caught traders’ attention: Muse Spark 1.1, designed for agentic and coding tasks, and Muse Image, a generative image tool. Together, they signal concrete monetization opportunities in AI compute and cloud services.

Meta has been spending heavily on AI infrastructure. The company’s 2026 capital expenditure guidance sits between $125 billion and $145 billion, almost entirely directed at AI-related investments.

Meta’s answer to investor questions about returns is twofold. First, the core advertising business keeps growing. Projected ad revenue for 2026 is approximately $240 billion to $243 billion. Second, AI subscriptions are expected to contribute up to $3 billion in revenue by 2027, creating an entirely new revenue stream that didn’t exist a year ago.

The full automation play

Perhaps the most ambitious target in Meta’s current roadmap is its goal to fully automate ad creation and targeting by the end of 2026. Meta wants AI to handle creative, targeting, and optimization — all handled by machine learning models trained on billions of data points about user behavior.

The AI tools already deliver personalized ad variations, and the full automation push would take that capability further. Meta’s projected ad revenue of $240 billion or more in 2026 would position the company to potentially surpass Google in digital ad revenue.

Why crypto and tech investors should pay attention

The capital expenditure figures alone tell a story about where institutional money is flowing. Between $125 billion and $145 billion in a single year on AI infrastructure means massive demand for semiconductors, data center capacity, and energy — the same supply chains that Bitcoin miners and crypto infrastructure companies compete for.

The risk side of the equation is worth watching too. Meta’s capex guidance of up to $145 billion is a massive commitment. If ad revenue growth slows or AI products fail to gain traction, those fixed costs don’t disappear.

Meta has set a clear deadline: full ad automation by year-end 2026. If it hits that target, it validates one of the largest corporate AI bets in history.

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