A bullish case for Meta stock, framed as good news for investors willing to bet the real AI winners are the ad giants selling to AI companies, not the AI startups themselves.

• The pitch: instead of buying AI startups, buy the ad platforms they pay to find users — and Meta is the top pick, trading cheap enough to potentially double.
• AI firms like Anthropic and Cohere are now buying banner ads to grab users before IPOs, and that ad spending is lifting the whole advertising business faster than Wall Street expected.
• Meta already has the users — 3.5 billion daily, about six times X — so it wins by charging more, not by growing: ad prices and impressions are up double digits even as user growth crawls at 4%.
• Its AI decides which shoppers are worth more, then spends more computing power to sell to them, which is pushing revenue up 33% and margins higher even as costs jump.
• Meta is cleaning house — laying off 8,000 workers, shifting 7,000 to AI, trimming pay — while still throwing huge money at data centers and selling spare computing power to rivals.

Outlook: This quarter is pegged as the likely bottom for Meta's stock, with a big upside target, though weak software stocks and recession risk could delay it.