London :
      Thursday’s premarket trading saw a sharp decline in Meta shares as investors became alarmed by the Facebook owner’s intentions to “invest aggressively” in artificial intelligence.

    The stock fell around 13%, threatening to erase about $163 billion from its market value as investors turned their attention from the company’s impressive first-quarter earnings to the enormous expenses associated with developing artificial intelligence.

   The business is in direct competition with Google and Microsoft to realize artificial intelligence’s immense potential. Even while there could be enormous rewards, Meta’s most recent earnings showed that creating the greatest tools will be expensive and take time.

  “Despite all of Meta’s ambitious AI initiatives, it cannot afford to lose focus on the foundation of its business, which is its advertising operations. Although Meta has abundant resources, its market share in digital advertising must be protected at all costs, the speaker continued. Instagram and WhatsApp owner Meta (META) reported on Wednesday that first-quarter profit more than quadrupled compared to the same period last year, while revenue increased by 27%. However, investors were apprehensive due to a rise in expected AI investments of up to $5 billion and the possibility of additional increases in the coming years.

The markets may be being alarmed by the wording surrounding expenditure intentions, according to Sophie Lund-Yates, chief stock analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown, who released a note on Thursday.

As it continues to speed infrastructure investments to enable AI, Meta announced that full-year capital expenditure would be in the range of $35–40 billion, up from previous guidance of $30–37 billion.

The company said in a statement, “We expect capital expenditures will continue to increase next year as we invest aggressively to support our ambitious AI research and product development efforts.” The majority of CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s remarks on an investor call were centered around AI. In order to develop even more sophisticated models, he stated that Meta “should invest significantly more over the coming years” in order to become “the leading AI company in the world.”

Before we receive a significant amount of money from some of these new products, Meta would raise spending “meaningfully.” Positively, we have a proven track record of successfully commercializing our innovative AI services once they achieve scale,” he continued.