Meta Platforms is a US group founded in 2004 and headquartered in Menlo Park, California. The company was founded on February 4, 2004 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as TheFacebook by Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz, Andrew McCollum and Chris Hughes; it was renamed Facebook in 2005 and Meta Platforms in October 2021. The group operates the Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger platforms. The business is funded almost entirely by digital advertising served across the services' vast user base.
AI relevance
With the Llama model family, Meta has established one of the best-known lines of open-weight large language models. The fourth generation, introduced in April 2025, comprises three variants according to Meta AI: Llama 4 Scout (109 billion total parameters, 17 billion active parameters across 16 experts, a context window of up to 10 million tokens), Llama 4 Maverick (400 billion total parameters, also 17 billion active parameters across 128 experts, a 1 million token context window), and the not-yet-released teacher model Llama 4 Behemoth with nearly 2 trillion total parameters. The group also runs its own research unit (Fundamental AI Research, FAIR), the newly created Meta Superintelligence Labs unit, and the Meta AI assistant inside its apps.
Business model
Meta reports in two segments: Family of Apps (FoA) and Reality Labs (RL). In fiscal year 2025, FoA generated revenue of roughly $198.76 billion with operating income of roughly $102.47 billion. Reality Labs, the division for VR/AR hardware such as the Quest headsets, generated revenue of roughly $2.21 billion with an operating loss of roughly $19.19 billion. AI serves two purposes at Meta: it improves the advertising relevance and recommendation systems of the platforms and is at the same time a strategic investment area.
Key figures
For fiscal year 2025, Meta reports group revenue of roughly $200.97 billion, up 22% from 2024. As of December 31, 2025, the group employed 78,865 people, up 6% year over year. The average number of daily active people across the app family (Family DAP) was 3.58 billion in December 2025, up 7%. The chief executive is Mark Zuckerberg, who holds roughly 13.7% of Meta's equity but controls about 61.2% of shareholder voting power through a dual-class share structure; The Vanguard Group (about 8.8%) and BlackRock (about 7.7%) are among the largest institutional shareholders. The Class A shares trade on Nasdaq under the ticker META.
Investment in AI infrastructure
Capital expenditure reached roughly $72.22 billion in 2025; for 2026 Meta expects $115 to $135 billion, driven in part by the work of Meta Superintelligence Labs and the core business. These sums flow mainly into data centers and AI compute infrastructure.
Open models and long-term bets
With the Llama model family, Meta pursues a comparatively open strategy by releasing models with inspectable weights. In parallel, the group invests heavily in AI infrastructure and long-term projects, which drives spending upward. The business nonetheless remains heavily dependent on the advertising market and its cycles; Reality Labs continues to generate large losses while the core advertising platforms deliver the profits.
This profile is a neutral description and is not investment advice.