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By Timothy Mason | Apr 19, 2026 | Featured, News & Analysis, US
Meta Platforms (NASDAQ: META) is approaching its first-quarter 2026 earnings call on April 29 as one of the most uniformly recommended stocks in the large-cap technology universe, with 42 covering analysts carrying a consensus of zero sell ratings and a mean price target of $847.70 implying more than 20 percent upside from current trading levels around $676, against the backdrop of an operational story that continues to improve even as the share price sits roughly 15 percent below its late 2025 peak.
The most recent catalyst ahead of the print was an April 14 announcement that Meta has committed to deploying one gigawatt of its own custom MTIA AI chips built in partnership with Broadcom on a 2-nanometer process, a deal that is expected to scale to multiple gigawatts by 2027 and represents a meaningful step in the company’s long-term strategy to reduce its dependence on Nvidia’s GPU ecosystem for AI training and inference workloads.
Custom chips are structurally cheaper and smaller than off-the-shelf GPUs, and if Meta successfully migrates a significant portion of AI workloads to its own silicon over the next two years, the margin benefit on a $115 to $135 billion capital expenditure plan could be substantial, partially offsetting the investor concern about escalating infrastructure costs that has weighed on the stock since the full-year guidance was issued earlier in the year.
For Q1, analysts at Wells Fargo project revenue of $55.9 billion representing 32 percent year-on-year growth, with the company having guided for $53.5 to $56.5 billion, a range that leaves room for a beat if the AI-powered Advantage+ advertising suite continues to perform at the approximately $60 billion annual run rate management cited in its most recent communications.
The March 31 launch of Instagram Plus, a paid subscription tier that offers additional features for the platform’s most engaged users, adds a new revenue dimension that will not show up meaningfully in Q1 figures but will be closely watched in management commentary for early adoption data and pricing acceptance signals, given that it represents Meta’s first serious attempt at subscription monetisation at scale across its core social media properties.
Daily active people across the family of apps reached 3.58 billion as of the most recent reporting, up seven percent year on year, while ad impressions grew 18 percent with price per ad increasing six percent, a combination that suggests the underlying advertising business is firing on multiple cylinders heading into a quarter that management was guiding for with unusual confidence.
Reality Labs, the division responsible for Quest headsets and Meta AI glasses, is expected to report cumulative losses approaching $85 billion across its existence, a figure that continues to generate scepticism about the long-term viability of the bet, but which has not materially dented investor enthusiasm for the core Family of Apps business as long as advertising margins remain robust.
The broader context for the April 29 print includes reports that Meta was working on a new frontier AI model known internally as Avocado, positioning the company as not just an infrastructure deployer but an increasingly serious frontier AI developer in its own right, a strategic dimension that has the potential to either expand Meta’s competitive moat or, if the costs prove unmanageable, add further pressure to an already elevated capex line.
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Timothy Mason is a senior reporter at the Foreign Policy Journal, covering current affairs and business news.
© 2016 Foreign Policy Journal
