Everything seems to be about artificial intelligence these days. Even after a period of AI-fatigue in the stock market, companies better not get their AI-ambitions wrong. News that Meta Platforms, Inc. (NASDAQ: META) was delaying its Llama 4 Behemoth large-language model sent Meta shares lower. It closed down 2.3% at $643.88 on Thursday and the stock was initially down by 1.3% at $635.00 on Friday morning. One analyst on Wall Street is taking the other side of the coin.
Loop Capital analyst Rob Sanderson reiterated his Buy rating on Team Zuckerberg, and he raised the firm’s price target on Meta Platforms to $888 from $695 in his call. This now represents an implied upside of nearly 40% if everything works out, and it’s also about $150 over the prior high of $740.91.
Loop Capital’s report talked up Meta’s better-than-expected outlook for the second quarter of 2025 when so many companies were slashing guidance or withdrawing guidance. And while a drop in advertising spending intensity from Chinese sellers buying ads to sell goods was noted, Loop Capital believes the notion that this would flatten revenue growth was simply the wrong read by the market.
Sanderson sees Meta remaining the best non-hardware beneficiary of AI right now. The report went on to indicate that Meta’s stock should outperform the Magnificent-7 peer group this year.
According to the WSJ’s prior day report, Meta’s engineers are struggling on the large-language models. The question is now if the functions merit enough improvement over prior versions to justify the release. The problem with this delay is that Meta’s prior 2025 capital spending forecast of $60 billion to $65 billion was raised to a range of $64 billion to $72 billion after its last earnings report. That’s a lot of capital out the door only to have delays and reports that improvements do not justify the new Behemoth release.
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Loop Capital still believes that Meta’s AI advancements already seen have compensated for any losses tied to Chinese ad-spending slower in a tariff environment. These gains are also above the firm’s prior predictions.
Another issue for the upgraded target here is that it now values Meta at 30-times earnings after having lowered it to 25-times earnings. Loop Capital also recommended that long-term growth investors should consider shifting to Meta over Google — Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOGL).
And, as usual, there seem to be little to no real concerns over the number of financial scams taking place on Facebook and Instagram.
