Meta Platforms, Inc. (META) Expands Llama AI Models to U.S. Government and Defense, Partnering with Top Tech Firms

We recently compiled a list of the 10 AI News You Shouldn’t Miss. In this article, we are going to take a look at where Meta Platforms, Inc. (NASDAQ:META) stands against the other AI stocks you shouldn’t miss.

John Lovelock, Chief of Research for Global IT Forecasting at Gartner, joined CNBC’s Worldwide Exchange to discuss the major catalyst for IT spending in 2025: Generative AI. He states that companies are now moving from cost-saving optimizations and any upgrading they have been focused on for the past eighteen months, with growth back on their agenda. For 2025, “they are shifting back to growth”, he says, emphasizing the need for GenAI to boost revenue expansion.

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Lovelock further elaborates that most of the growth in GenAI spending this year and next year is in the tech sector. All the big-tech companies are building the AI infrastructure needed for GenAI, whereas software companies are spending to incorporate GenAI in their products and services. The biggest area of growth next year, however, is data centers, projected to grow over 15%. When asked if this is a slowdown from the previous year’s 35% growth, he remarked that the denominator is getting “awfully big”.

Enterprises, banks, governments, retailers, and everyone else are building up or buying AI-optimized servers. However, the biggest purchasers are still the hyperscalers. The massive amount of money they are going to be spending will surpass all of the money Big Tech companies have previously spent on CPU servers from 2000 to 2026. While the net increase continues, the sheer spending of the hyperscalers is keeping the growth rate down, Lovelock notes.

New estimates from Morgan Stanley reinstate the same, with four of the Big Tech companies expected to invest about $300 billion in capital expenditures next year, and 2026 is expected to be even bigger. The bank notes that much of the CapEx is focused on hyperscalers. These hyperscalers, with their extensive cloud networks, are in a significant multi-year investment cycle driven by the pursuit of opportunities in generative AI and large language models.

“These high and rising CapEx numbers again speak to the importance of continued disclosure about new/incremental adoption, engagement, and revenue opportunities each of the four companies are seeing and investing in”.

-Bank’s analysts said.

The Latest Developments in AI

In recent AI news, we’ve seen prominent announcements from companies unveiling breakthroughs in large language models, AI hardware, and partnerships that aim to incorporate AI more deeply into core business functions. On November 5, CNBC reported that Perplexity AI, the artificial intelligence startup, is in the final stages of raising $500 million in funding at a $9 billion valuation. The company has been gaining significant investor attention due to the generative AI boom.

In other news, You.com and TollBit’s have created a partnership for the first-of-its-kind AI agent. “Election Agent” will be able to access accurate, authoritative results and race calls from Decision Desk HQ — the election data provider that was the first to call the presidential elections of 2016 and 2020. Americans will be able to access the same election results, race calls, and data that are provided by major news organizations but through an accessible AI chat interface.

“There’s a big unsolved need in the AI industry: scalably connecting AI companies directly with authoritative data sources. With the first presidential election in the AI era, concerns about misinformation are at the forefront. Much of today’s data isn’t readily accessible. Through our platform, Decision Desk HQ made its real-time election APIs available to AI companies at scale. This partnership with You.com, which has set the standard for grounded, accurate AI responses, demonstrates that AI can deliver real-time information responsibly when connected to authoritative sources. That’s ultimately what builds trust in AI – giving it direct access to ground truth data”.

– Toshit Panigrahi, co-founder CEO of TollBit.

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A team of developers working in unison to create the company’s messaging application.

Meta Platforms, Inc. (NASDAQ:META)

Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 219

Meta Platforms, Inc. (NASDAQ:META) is a social technology company that builds applications and technologies to help people connect, find communities, as well as grow businesses. The company is a key Artificial Intelligence player, focusing on advancing AI and developing related tools. Meta AI, the company’s virtual assistant, has more than 500 million active users only a year after its launch.

On November 4, Meta Platforms, Inc. (NASDAQ:META) revealed that it is making Llama, a family of autoregressive large language models released by Meta, available to U.S. government agencies. This includes those that are working on defense and national security applications, and private sector partners supporting their work. They stated that they are partnering with companies including Accenture Federal Services, Amazon Web Services, Anduril, Booz Allen, Databricks, Deloitte, IBM, Leidos, Lockheed Martin, Microsoft, Oracle, Palantir, Scale AI, and Snowflake to bring Llama to government agencies.  According to Meta, these responsible and ethical uses of open source models such as Llama will support the prosperity and security of the US, as well as help establish U.S. open source standards in the global race for AI leadership.

“This quarter, we released Llama 3.2, including the leading small models that run on-device and open source multi-modal models. We’re working with enterprises to make it easier to use, and now we’re also working with the public sector to adopt Llama across the US government.”

-Mark Zuckerberg in Meta’s Q3 earnings report.

Overall META ranks 2nd on our list of the AI stocks you shouldn’t miss. While we acknowledge the potential of META as an investment, our conviction lies in the belief that some AI stocks hold greater promise for delivering higher returns and doing so within a shorter timeframe. If you are looking for an AI stock that is more promising than META but that trades at less than 5 times its earnings, check out our report about the cheapest AI stock.

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Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.