Wall St Engine@wallstengine
JPMorgan Downgrades $META to Neutral from Overweight, Lowers PT to $725 from $825
Analyst comments: "We believe full-stack AI competition is intensifying and Meta has a more challenging path to returns on heavy AI capex beyond advertising.
Most notably, Google and Amazon are seeing strong cloud revenue acceleration, with Google Cloud backlog almost doubling quarter-over-quarter, and AWS backlog increasing +50% quarter-over-quarter. We believe both provide a line of sight toward multi-year ROIC across AI capex as Google and Amazon benefit from deep enterprise tech stack integrations, silicon supply, and model diversity.
META raised its 2026 capex guide by $10B to $125B-$145B, and we now project capex growth of +42% to $202B in 2027, resulting in negative FCF of -$4B in 2026 and -$24B in 2027. More near-term, META will continue to optimize AI-driven ad ranking and recommendation and tech gains, grow engagement, and deliver strong revenue growth. However, revenue growth will likely decelerate through 2026, driven by tougher year-over-year comps, Middle East conflict headwinds, Europe LPA implementation, and FX.
For now, we’re moving to Neutral-rated and believe shares could remain pressured as investors look for greater clarity on agentic products and how Muse models will help drive incremental revenue beyond advertising. Our $725 PT is based on 21x 2027E GAAP EPS of $34.01.
The release of Muse Spark represents the first step toward META’s goal of pushing the frontier and delivering personal superintelligence to billions of users, with the MSL team already training more advanced models. The rollout of Muse to Meta AI drove double-digit increases in Meta AI sessions per user and Muse demonstrates strong capabilities across visual understanding, health, shopping, social content, creating games, and more.
While Meta AI currently represents a powerful AI assistant, META is focused on building personal and business agents that can take action to help consumers and businesses achieve their goals. We believe compute capacity is critical to determining the quality of models and products it can develop, and META increased full-year capex guidance by $10B to $125B-$145B largely due to higher component costs, including memory.
AI-driven engagement and monetization improvements continue to support strong top-line growth. Video in particular fueled record engagement across Facebook and Instagram in 1Q, as ranking improvements drove +8%+ increases in total video time spent on Facebook and +10% increases in time spent on Instagram Reels.
META continues to simplify campaign creation and management for advertisers, with more than 4 million advertisers using at least one Gen AI creative tool and strong adoption of META’s Value Optimization suite.
Other notable points include META seeing improving trends in April, with 2Q guide factors in a range of scenarios; Europe LPA rollout is expected to pressure revenue beginning in 2Q; AI glasses continue to perform well with daily users tripling year-over-year in 1Q; and META confirmed plans to reduce headcount in May, though 2026 savings will likely be offset by restructuring costs and cloud deals."
Analyst: Doug Anmuth
