According to Similarweb data cited by TechCrunch on January 18, Meta’s Threads app reached 141.5 million daily active mobile users across iOS and Android as of January 7, overtaking Elon Musk’s X, which logged 125 million mobile daily users. While X continues to lead on web with approximately 150 million daily visits, Threads has experienced steady monthly growth since its 2023 launch. This shift in mobile engagement underscores Meta’s ability to capture a growing share of text-based social interaction on handheld devices, a key metric for advertisers targeting on-the-go consumers.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta Compute, the company’s centralized AI and data-center arm, will build tens of gigawatts of compute capacity this decade, scaling toward hundreds of gigawatts over time—energy levels comparable to small nations. Leadership under Santosh Janardhan, Daniel Gross and President Dina Powell McCormick will oversee data center design, supply-chain partnerships and strategic capacity planning. This effort positions Meta to compete directly with Google, Microsoft and OpenAI by securing reliable energy procurement and in-house infrastructure to support future generations of large language models.

Meta invested $39 billion in capital expenditures for 2024 and guided to approximately $71 billion for 2025, with CFO Susan Li projecting even larger year-over-year growth in 2026. These investments are financed by robust profitability—Meta generated $37.7 billion in net income on $141.1 billion of revenue through the first nine months of 2025—and massive free cash flow. Management reports that AI-driven features are boosting user engagement across Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger and Threads, while advertisers contributed $50 billion in Q3 ad revenue (98% of total), benefiting from automated targeting tools that reduce campaign costs.

Meta’s expanding user base (3.54 billion daily active users across its platforms as of Q3 2025), combined with aggressive AI-infrastructure build-out and strong ad revenue trends, creates a foundation for sustainable growth. Continued capex growth reflects leadership confidence in AI’s ability to drive both engagement and monetization. For long-term investors, the interplay of mobile user gains, proprietary compute capacity and proven profitability suggests that Meta’s strategic pivot toward AI could translate into above-market returns over the next several years, provided execution remains on track.