Meta has powered through its ugliest quarter in years with a blockbuster advertising rebound, giving marketers fresh confidence that the company’s AI-fuelled ad stack is back in full flight.
For the December quarter, Meta delivered A$92.8 billion in revenue, up 24% year-on-year, as holiday ad demand and AI-driven targeting lifted performance across Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger.
That marks a sharp reset from the September quarter, when Meta was knocked sideways by a one-off tax hit of around A$24.8 billion, distorting earnings and triggering a sell-off that spooked both investors and advertisers heading into the crucial Christmas trading window.
Ad demand and AI drove the rebound
Meta delivered A$90.1 billion in advertising revenue in Q4, up 24% year-on-year, while ad impressions jumped 18% and average prices rose 6%.
Across the full year, Meta generated A$311.5 billion in revenue, underlining just how dominant its ad ecosystem remains, even as the company pours unprecedented capital into artificial intelligence and infrastructure.
The scale matters for marketers. Meta’s Family of Apps now reaches 3.58 billion people every day, up 7% year-on-year, giving advertisers reach and frequency that few global platforms can match.
And increasingly, that scale is being amplified by machine-learning systems that decide what content and ads people see – the very systems Meta is now turbo-charging with large language models.
Will Easton, Managing Director, Meta ANZ
Why advertisers are leaning back in
In Australia and New Zealand, Meta is positioning the earnings rebound as proof that its AI-led ad engine is already delivering in-market results.
“We’ve had a record quarter, and our earnings results show Meta’s platforms continue to drive record growth for our partners with surging holiday demand and innovative experiences for our users around the world, including Australia and New Zealand,” said Will Easton, Managing Director, Meta ANZ.
“Our significant investments in AI have made this possible, and we are working on improving this even further by merging our LLMs with the recommendation systems that power our Family of Apps and our ad systems. In 2026, I’m looking forward to introducing the next wave of innovations across our platforms and helping businesses across Australia and New Zealand find new opportunities for growth.”
That focus on fusing generative AI with ad delivery and recommendation engines is central to Meta’s pitch to brands: better targeting, smarter creative optimisation, and higher returns in a world where cookies, device IDs and third-party data are steadily being stripped away.
The Q3 tax shock that rattled the market
The strength of Q4 matters even more when set against what came before.
In the September quarter, Meta was hit by a massive US tax reform-related charge, which pushed its full-year effective tax rate to 30% and blew out its tax bill to A$39.5 billion for 2025. Without that charge, Meta said its tax rate would have been closer to 13%.
That accounting shock masked otherwise solid ad performance and sparked fears that Meta’s enormous AI spending push would collide with weakening profitability.
Instead, Q4 showed Meta still has the commercial engine to fund its ambitions.
For the December quarter alone, Meta generated A$38.3 billion in operating income and A$21.8 billion in free cash flow, even as it ramped up spending on data centres, chips and technical talent.
Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg
Spending big, but betting on ads
Meta is now preparing advertisers for a huge step-up in infrastructure investment in 2026, forecasting capital expenditure of between A$178 billion and A$209 billion as it builds out what it calls its “Meta Superintelligence Labs”.
Those investments will be funded, overwhelmingly, by advertising.
Meta’s Family of Apps generated A$158.8 billion in operating profit in 2025, easily offsetting losses in its Reality Labs division, which continues to burn cash on VR, AR and metaverse bets.
For brands, that’s the key signal: the experimental side of Meta may be expensive, but the ad machine that powers Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp is still throwing off enormous profit – and that profit is being reinvested into making ads work harder.
For advertisers in Australia and New Zealand, that means more automation, smarter targeting and deeper integration between creative, commerce and discovery across Meta’s platforms – just as consumer spending, media fragmentation and privacy rules get tougher.