Meta Caps Its Best Week Since Early 2024 as AI Bets Win Over Wall Street
The tl;dr
Meta shares closed out their strongest week in more than two years, rising about 15% as investors warmed to Mark Zuckerberg's aggressive AI spending plans. The stock jumped roughly 6% on Friday alone to around $670, its highest level since April, and the rally erased Meta's loss for the year. Driving it was a run of AI product launches, the Muse Image and Muse Spark 1.1 models, reports that Meta will start making its own Iris data-center chip in September, and a Bank of America note arguing the company can build AI capacity far more cheaply than Wall Street had feared.
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30-day · delayedKey points
- Meta shares rose about 15% over the week, their best five-day stretch since early 2024, and jumped roughly 6% on Friday to around $670, the highest level since April.
- The rally wiped out Meta's losses for 2026 and pushed the stock back into positive territory for the year, reversing a slump that followed its large April capital-spending guidance.
- The catalysts were a cluster of AI news: the Muse Image model for creating images, the Muse Spark 1.1 model for coding and agentic tasks, and reports via Reuters that Meta will begin producing its in-house Iris data-center chip in September on the way to 14 gigawatts of compute.
- Bank of America's Justin Post said Meta may be able to build and run AI infrastructure far more cheaply than expected, pegging the cost near $22 billion per gigawatt versus a prior estimate around $45 billion, and reiterated a buy rating with an $835 target.
- Friday's move added roughly $12.7 billion to Mark Zuckerberg's net worth; the broader analyst consensus now rates Meta a strong buy with an average price target near $827.
By the numbers
Meta just had the kind of week that rewrites a narrative. Its shares rose about 15% over the five sessions, the best weekly run since early 2024, and climbed roughly 6% on Friday alone to close near $670, their highest level since April. The surge erased the stock’s losses for 2026 and pushed it back into the green for the year, a sharp reversal from the spring, when investors recoiled at the scale of Meta’s planned AI spending. Friday’s rally alone added roughly $12.7 billion to Mark Zuckerberg’s personal fortune.
The turn was driven by a run of AI announcements that finally gave Wall Street something concrete to price. Earlier in the week Meta unveiled Muse Image, a model for generating images aimed at creators and advertisers, then followed it with Muse Spark 1.1, an updated model built for coding and agentic tasks, while opening its models more widely to outside developers. On top of that, Reuters reported that Meta plans to start producing its own data-center chip, code-named Iris, in September, part of a push toward 14 gigawatts of computing power. The most important shift may have come from Bank of America, whose analyst Justin Post wrote that Meta appears to have found a way to build and operate that infrastructure far more cheaply than expected, pegging the cost near $22 billion per gigawatt against a prior estimate around $45 billion, and kept a buy rating with an $835 price target.
What makes the move notable is that nothing about Meta’s ambition actually changed; the market’s read on it did. The company’s April guidance for a massive capital-spending ramp was what sent the stock down in the first place, and now the promise of cheaper capacity and a clearer path to monetizing it has flipped that same story into a reason to buy. In effect, investors are starting to treat Meta as an AI infrastructure company rather than only an advertising business, with the broader analyst consensus now at a strong buy and an average target near $827. The optimism is not without risk: Meta is due to report earnings by the end of the month, and analysts expect only modest revenue growth alongside a steep drop in per-share profit as the spending bites. For now, though, a stock the market spent the spring doubting has just delivered its best week in more than two years.
For months the market punished Meta for the sheer size of its AI spending, and this week it decided that spending might actually pay off. The swing is the story: the same capital-expenditure plans that sank the stock in April are now the reason it just booked its best week in over two years. What changed was not the size of the bet but the perceived economics of it, with a credible Wall Street estimate that Meta can add AI capacity at less than half the cost previously assumed, alongside concrete product and chip milestones that make the outlay look like a plan rather than a black hole. It reframes Meta as an AI infrastructure player, not just an ad-supported social network, and hands Zuckerberg a rare stretch of investor goodwill heading into an earnings report due by month-end. The caution is that revenue growth is expected to be modest next quarter while earnings per share may fall sharply, so the market is paying up front for a payoff that still has to arrive.
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Topics
- meta
- tech stocks
- ai
- zuckerberg
- data centers
- capital spending
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