Mark Zuckerberg’s AI hiring spree is costing a lot of money. His investors don’t care.

Meta’s stock rose by over 10% on Wednesday following the announcement of earnings that exceeded predictions. The company’s revenue for the second quarter was recorded at $47.5 billion, marking a 22% increase from the previous year. The daily user count on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp swelled to nearly 3.5 billion. Meta cautioned Wall Street about an increase in spending on data centers and recruitment in the coming year. As a result, the company’s market value rose by more than $175 billion, which is equivalent to over 12 deals at Scale AI.

During the earnings call, Zuckerberg stated, “Our business is thriving, allowing us to significantly invest in AI.” He emphasized that their focus is firmly on advancing towards AI capable of surpassing human intelligence entirely. Zuckerberg highlighted the resources available to team members in their superintelligence lab, noting they have “access to extensive computing power” for training new models that are expected to “advance the frontier within about a year.”

Zuckerberg’s previous ambitious endeavor was the metaverse, a topic that was briefly mentioned at the end of the earnings call. Although it’s too soon to directly compare the metaverse and AI projects, they both share a crucial requirement: substantial funding that only a giant like Meta can supply.

The AI initiative differs from the metaverse because it is already positively impacting Meta’s advertising business. According to CFO Susan Li, a new AI model for advertisements has resulted in around a 5% increase in conversions on Facebook and a 3% rise on Instagram. Furthermore, large language models are beginning to influence how posts are ranked across all of the company’s apps, including Threads.

Despite Meta’s continuous heavy investment in the metaverse, with expected expenses reaching $100 billion in the Reality Labs division this year, AI is now undeniably Zuckerberg’s primary focus. However, unlike the metaverse, where he aimed to create an entirely new platform, Zuckerberg is now in a competitive race with AI advancements, although he is using considerable resources on hand for this endeavor.