Meta sell-side bulls get more bullish after getting ‘more of everything’

Meta Plaforms (NASDAQ:META) is hearing the applause from Wall Street after its blowout quarterly results.

Sell-side analysts, already bullish on the stock, rushed to boost estimates and prices targets following the numbers.

The stock rose more than +12% in premarket trading.

Meta delivered “more of everything than was expected,” Wells Fargo analyst Ken Gawrelski said, citing more revenue and EPS and an “early look to 2026 OpEx/CapEx that is considerably more than expected.”

“Robust growth outlooks offsets investment, driving investor EPS expectations modestly higher for ’26/’27,” Gawrelski added. Already Overweight on the stock, he boosted his price target to $811 from $783, with an upside scenario at $981, which would be driven “by continued strong contribution from Reels, Advantage+ and ad pricing improvement.”

“Bottom line, we are left with higher near-term (1-, 2-, 3-year) profitability and a growing list of long-term optionalities for further core growth (engagement and/or monetization improvements, content creation tools, Meta AI, search, business agents, devices, etc.) or superintelligence/GenAI to drive even longer growth,” Morgan Stanley analyst Brian Nowak said.

Nowak boosted his price target to $850 from $750, with a bull case of $1,100 where “AI investments drive increased engagement and lead to new products/tools, which supports outsized ad monetization and revenue growth.”

J.P. Morgan analyst Doug Anmuth, who raised his target to $875 from $795, noted on capex that while the high end of its 2025 guidance “is unchanged at $72B, the company indicated that it is likely to spend around $100B on capex in 2026 as it pursues its vision to bring superintelligence to everyone.”

“We’re impressed that despite a challenging Llama 4 rollout & major changes to the AI team, Meta did not miss a beat in its core ad business, which saw significant acceleration in ad impressions to +11%,” Anmuth said. “Additionally, we like that Meta’s business opportunity set for AI — ads, engagement, business messaging, MetaAI, & AI devices — remains intact.”

On what investors may want to watch out for, Jefferies analyst Brent Thill highlighted 2026 capex growth that may limit near-term free cash flow, higher 2026 expense growth that could lead to operating profit margin compression and tougher comps in Q4.

But he, too, remains bullish, raising his price target to $950 from $845 with an upside target of $1,126 provided leadership in “virtual reality and the Metaverse position META well for the next decade of growth,” along with Messenger, and WhatsApp monetization coming faster than expected and Instagram’s new features making the service stickier.