Meta’s stock price heading into May 18 reflects trader focus on the company’s aggressive AI push following its April 29 earnings release, where revenue rose 33 percent year-over-year to $56.31 billion yet shares fell sharply after Meta raised 2026 capital-expenditure guidance to $125–145 billion to support large-language-model training and infrastructure. The launch of Muse Spark, the first model from Meta Superintelligence Labs, and the expanded rollout of its AI business assistant for advertisers have underscored competitive positioning against OpenAI and Google, while planned May workforce reductions and new employee-tracking tools for AI data collection add near-term operational uncertainty. With no major product launches or regulatory deadlines in the immediate window, sentiment hinges on whether ongoing ad-monetization gains from generative tools outweigh the market’s reaction to elevated spending.