Meta Shares Rise to Record High as Zuckerberg's Update Adds to AI Fervor

Shares advanced 2% to $383.45 in New York Friday. That surpasses the previous record high posted in 2021.

The tech giant also got a boost from optimism that financial results due for release on Feb. 1 will confirm sustained solid growth for the company that saw its stock climb 180% in the past 12 months. CFRA, an independent research provider, raised its target price on the stock to $430, from $390 ahead of its earnings release.

"We see increasing opportunities tied to Reels, Advantage+ shopping campaigns, Llama, business messaging, AI agents, and the metaverse," MT Newswires quoted CFRA analysts as saying.

On average, analysts expect Meta to report fourth-quarter earnings of $4.97, more than doubling from $1.76 a year earlier, as revenue expands, according to estimates published by Yahoo Finance.

"We're building massive compute infrastructure to support our future roadmap, including 350k H100s by the end of this year -- and overall, almost 600k H100s equivalents of compute if you include other GPUs," Zuckerberg said in the post on Instagram, referring to Nvidia's chip.

Nvidia's H100 is the most powerful graphics processing unit (GPU) chip on the market specifically for artificial intelligence applications, enabling the processing of large amounts of data much faster than older GPUs, according to a post on the World Economic Forum website.

Zuckerberg said Meta's long-term vision is to build general intelligence, open source it and make it widely available. He also said he's "excited over our progress building new AI-centric computing devices like Ray Ban Meta smart glasses."

"Lots more to come soon," Zuckerberg said, without providing more details.