Meta Platforms’ revenue increased 22% year over year for a total of $47.52 billion in Q2 2025, according to an earnings statement, beating Wall Street expectations. The online commerce vertical was the largest contributor to year-over-year growth in ad revenue, with a “meaningful percent” of its ad revenue coming from campaigns using the company’s generative artificial intelligence (AI) features, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on an earnings call.
The tech giant attributed the strong performance of its underlying advertising business to the power of AI to drive greater efficiency. Improvements to its AI-powered recommendation engine for ads and content has driven more ad conversions on Instagram (roughly 5%) and Facebook (3%) and led to increases in time spent on both platforms.
Meta’s robust growth demonstrates that the company not only weathered the uncertainty that has roiled the entire economy, but could perhaps benefit from it, as marketers looked for lower cost, higher performing advertising, according to eMarketer senior analyst Minda Smiley.
“Its strong quarter signals that the broader digital advertising market might not yet feel the pain from tariffs, though that could change. And Meta, with its massive userbase and savvy advertising platform, is likely to fare better than smaller social networks should advertiser pullbacks set in later this year,” Smiley said in emailed comments.
Adoption of generative AI ad creative tools continues to grow, with nearly 2 million advertisers using video generation features Image Animation and Video Expansion. Text generation tools are also generating strong results, according to the company.
While the expansion of AI is driving growth across the company’s revenue centers, it is also growing expenses, which Meta now expects to be in the range of $114 to $118 billion for the full year — a growth rate of 20% to 24% year over year. Infrastructure is the largest single driver of growth.
Despite the high cost, Meta is still full-steam ahead on AI, with Zuckerberg using both the earnings call and a separate message on social media to hype the next stage of the technology. Meta believes that superintelligence, defined as AI that surpasses human intelligence, is now in sight.
“Meta's vision is to bring personal superintelligence to everyone — so that people can direct it towards what they value in their own lives. We believe this has the potential to begin an exciting new era of individual empowerment,” Zuckerberg said on the call.
