Meta wins back Wall Street with AI promises

Meta Platforms is a Wall Street darling again.

The company's shares continued their winning streak on Thursday (Apr 27), surging nearly 14 per cent after Meta's focus on AI and cost-cutting cheered investors whose enthusiasm has already helped the social media behemoth nearly double in value this year.

Meta is set to add around US$75 billion to its market valuation and overtake Nvidia as the best-performing stock in the S&P 500 index on a year-to-date basis, if gains hold.

The rally also lifted other tech companies from Snap and Pinterest to Amazon.com by as much as 3.1 per cent.

"If you want to be treated and valued like a growth stock, you need growth! And this is precisely what Meta delivered returning to growth ... just as questions around a potential recession get louder," Bernstein analyst Mark Shmulik said in a note.

Shmulik was among the 27 analysts who raised their price targets on Meta, pushing the median view to US$270, which represents an upside of nearly 13 per cent to a stock that is already leading gains among Big Tech companies this year.

Meta beat expectations for first-quarter profit and revenue, which rose for the first time in nearly a year, the latest sign that American tech giants were digging themselves out of a slump that has sparked tens of thousands of layoffs.

The results also underscored the rising importance of AI, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg saying the tech was helping to boost traffic to Facebook and Instagram and earn more in ad sales.

"We believe AI has played a crucial role in shifting Meta from showing a more limited set of friends, family, and followed content to an almost unlimited set of recommended content now available in Reels and Feed," JP Morgan analysts said.

Zuckerberg also said the company, which has carried out several expensive overhauls to bolster its core business, was no longer behind in building out its AI infrastructure.

"Year of efficiency paves the way to AI offense," Roth MKM's Rohit Kulkarni said.