Technology giant Meta announced its first dividend coinciding with a revenue report that surpassed expectations due to strong ad and device sales during the holiday shopping season. The tech giant declared a dividend of $0.50 per share and also signaled its intention to continue share repurchases by announcing an additional $50 billion share buyback authorization. The company’s better-than-expected revenue report pushed up artificial intelligence altcoins.
Meta shares rose over 10% following the strong revenue report.
Meta Boosts AI Altcoins
Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg highlighted the company’s progress in artificial intelligence and the metaverse in a statement. Meta reported a 25% increase in revenue to $40.1 billion for the quarter ending December 31, exceeding analysts’ estimates of $39.2 billion based on LSEG data. Zuckerberg said, “We had a good quarter as our community and business continue to grow. We have made significant progress in our vision to advance artificial intelligence and the metaverse.”
Following Meta’s revenue report that exceeded expectations, leading AI altcoins such as Render (RNDR) and Fetch.ai (FET) saw sharp increases. The CoinDesk Indicies’ Computing Select Index (CPUS), which only includes AI altcoins, rose by approximately 10% in the last 24 hours. In contrast, according to CoinDesk Indicies data, the price of Bitcoin (BTC) increased by only 2% during the same period.
In the CPUS, the price of RNDR and Akash Network (AKT) rose by 4.1% and 5.2% respectively in the last 24 hours. RNDR and AKT are known to be among the largest AI altcoins by market value.
Meta Shares Rise with AI Vision
Although Zuckerberg has maintained his commitment to this dream, Meta has lost over $20 billion since 2021 due to abandoning its metaverse dreams. Overall, Meta’s metaverse dream and vision have not attracted market interest as expected, and the company’s shares fell by about 60% throughout 2022. Following this decline, Zuckerberg announced the company’s AI vision about a year ago. This announcement led to a surge in the company’s shares by over 100%.
According to Yahoo Finance data, Meta shares are trading at $461.20, up 16.85% before today’s trading session. The company’s shares had closed the February 1st trading session with a 1.19% increase at $394.78.
