Meta had a turnover of $40.1 billion in the past quarter, a quarter more than a year earlier. The company is still spending billions on the metaverse, but says it also wants to invest more in artificial intelligence in the coming year.
Meta’s turnover increased to 40.1 billion dollars in the fourth quarter of 2023, equivalent to approximately 37.1 billion euros. That’s an increase of almost 25 percent compared to the same quarter in 2022, when the company had revenue of $32.1 billion. This was partly due to the fact that the number of users of services such as Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp increased on almost all metrics. The number of monthly active Facebook users rose the least at 3.07 billion in that quarter, still an increase of 3 percent compared to a year earlier. The total number of daily active users of all Meta software combined was 3.19 billion, an increase of 8 percent.
Meta still spends a lot of money on the metaverse. The so-called Reality Labs division made a loss of $4.6 billion in the past quarter. That was 4.2 billion a year earlier. Meta expects those losses to increase even higher in the coming years due to continued product developments and investments in the ecosystem.
It is striking that Meta mentions few concrete plans in the presentation of the quarterly figures for what it wants to do with the metaverse. The company mentions Reality Labs twice, but does so in combination with the term AI. Meta says it plans to invest in more server capacity in the coming years to support artificial intelligence. The company says it has no specific goals for that, but does have “ambitious long-term goals for AI research and development,” which will require more infrastructure.