TMTPOST -- Meta Platforms, Inc. shares rose as much as 8% and closed 4.2% higher Thursday. Share rallied after the Facebook operator flexed muscles in digital advertising for last quarter and continued to ratchet up artificial intelligence (AI) spending.

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Meta beat Wall Street expectation both top and bottom line for the quarter ended March 31. Revenue popped 16% year-over-year (YoY) to $42.31 billion, better than analysts estimated $41.38 billion. Though sales cooled compared with a 21% YoY increase for the previous quarter. Diluted earnings per share (EPS) was $6.43 with a 37% YoY increase, compared with projection of $5.25 per share. Operating income soared  35% YoY to $17.56 billion and operating margin increased 3 percentage points YoY to 41%, also above estimated income of $15.52 billion with a margin of 37.5%.

The closed-watched bread & butter advertising earned $41.39 billion with a 16% YoY rise, versus analysts estimated $40.55 billion. Meta needs its advertising business to continue growing in order to fund an expensive expansion in artificial intelligence, which is driving the future of the business through improvements to ads, algorithms and personalization.  

Family of Apps revenue added 16% YoY to $41.90 billion for the first quarter, compared with expected $40.89 billion. Revenue from Reality Labs, the hardware unit that houses metaverse technologies, dropped 6.4% YoY to $412 million, missing expectation of $496 million.

"We've had a strong start to an important year, our community continues to grow and our business is performing very well," said Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. "We're making good progress on AI glasses and Meta AI, which now has almost 1 billion monthly actives."  “I think we’re well positioned to navigate the macroeconomic uncertainty,” Zuckberg said on an earnings conference.

Meta’s guidance was also solid. It expected revenue for the second quarter to be in the range of $42.5 billion to $45.5 billion, in line with the estimate of $44.1 billion.For the full year, Meta called for total expenses to be in the range of $113billion to $118 billion, down from the prior outlook of $114billion to $119 billion.

But perhaps most important, at a time when investors were freaking out about sliding AI spending, Meta boosted its  capital expenditure (Capex) forecast. It now sees Capex for this year be in the range of $64billion to $72 billion, increased from its prior outlook of $60billion to $65 billion. That represented a lift of more than 7%.

“This updated outlook reflects additional data center investments to support our artificial intelligence efforts as well as an increase in the expected cost of infrastructure hardware,” Meta said in the earnings release.

Meta Chief Finance Officer Susan Li said the hike in expected infrastructure hardware is the result of “suppliers who source from countries around the world.” The CFO told analysts  “there’s just a lot of uncertainty around this, given the ongoing trade discussions”, adding that the company is "working on our end on mitigations by optimizing our supply chain."

Meanwhile, Microsoft Corporation said it plans to ramp up spending the current quarter when releasing its third fiscal quarter ended March 31. The software titan is on pace for Capex of more than $80 billion in its fiscal 2025 year. CFO Amy Hood confirmed the spending will grow at a slower pace later this year. Capex “will grow at a lower rate than FY 2025 and will include a greater mix of short-lived assets, which are more directly correlated to revenue than long-lived assets,” she said.

Google parent Alphabet Inc. reaffirmed its ambitious AI buildout plans with $75 billion Capex guidance for the year. These tech giants’ spending plan seem not to defy skeptics who have predicted a pullback.

"The combo of Microsoft saying demand exceeds supply for next quarter or two and Meta boosting capex by 10%-plus vs. prior to me says cloud capex spending next year is not going down," Mizuho Securities analyst Jordan Klein said in a note. "It will grow again and creates a pretty good setup for Nvidia, Broadcom , TSMC first and foremost."