Is Meta Platforms' Stock a Buy Ahead of Its Q2 Earnings Report?

It's shaping up to beryllium an absorbing net play for the large tech stocks. Alphabet acceptable the code connected July 22 with a coagulated second-quarter net study that saw gross leap 24% from a twelvemonth agone to $119.76 billion. Growth successful Google Cloud was adjacent amended astatine 82%.

One mightiness deliberation that investors would observe Alphabet's committedness to turn retired its all-important artificial quality infrastructure, but you'd beryllium wrong. Alphabet raised its capex guidance from $185 cardinal to $200 billion, and the banal promptly dropped 6%, taking respective different large tech stocks with it, arsenic investors are getting spooked by the magnitude of wealth being poured into AI close now.

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It's against this backdrop that chap Magnificent Seven subordinate Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META) prepares to study its quarterly net aft the closing doorbell connected July 29. Meta, similar Alphabet, has been spending heavy connected information centers. But dissimilar Alphabet, it doesn't person a unreality computing part of its ain to merchantability AI computing capableness arsenic a gross stream.

Is that astir to change? We whitethorn get immoderate answers erstwhile Meta steps up to the net podium.

Image source: Meta Platforms.

About Meta Platforms banal

Meta Platforms is easy 1 of the best-known companies successful the satellite -- aft all, it's not each institution whose origins are dramatized connected the metallic screen, but Meta (then known arsenic Facebook) got that attraction via 2010's The Social Network, with Hollywood stars Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, and Justin Timberlake successful starring roles. CEO Mark Zuckerberg is ranked connected the Bloomberg Billionaires Index arsenic the sixth-wealthiest idiosyncratic successful the world, with a nett worthy of $212 billion.

Today, the institution operates a bid of fashionable societal media sites, including Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp, and Threads. The household of apps, arsenic the institution calls them, are utilized by 3.56 cardinal radical per day, giving Meta Platforms tremendous reach.

Meta Platforms has grown to a marketplace headdress of $1.5 trillion, but 2026 hasn't been kind. Meta Platforms banal is down astir 10% truthful acold this twelvemonth and is astir 25% disconnected its all-time high. That driblet has the banal somewhat discounted, with a guardant price-to-earnings ratio of 18.7, beneath its five-year P/E mean of 24.8.

Meta appears to beryllium shifting gears