A pair of AI model launches and new details about Meta $META's custom chip efforts sent the company's shares up more than 5% Friday, enough to push the stock into positive territory for the year and cap a 15% weekly advance.
The rally follows three separate announcements this week. On Tuesday, Meta released Muse Image, an in-house image generation model available to consumers through the Meta AI app and to advertisers through its Advantage+ ad platform. Muse Spark 1.1 arrived Thursday, targeting agentic and coding use cases, and came bundled with a public developer API — marking the first instance of Meta putting a price tag on access to one of its models.
The API pricing undercuts rivals by a wide margin. Pricing for the API comes in at $1.25 per million input tokens and $4.25 per million output tokens. That compares with Anthropic's Opus 4.8 — the rival model Meta pointed to as a benchmark — which costs $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens. CEO Mark Zuckerberg characterized the pricing as roughly 25% of what Anthropic and OpenAI charge for comparable models.
Shares drew additional support from reporting that Iris, the company's first proprietary AI chip, is scheduled to move into production this September, CNBC reported. As an internal memo reviewed by Reuters outlined, Iris cleared its bug-testing phase in roughly six weeks without significant problems. Broadcom $AVGO is Meta's design partner on the chip, with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. handling fabrication. The chip is intended to supplement — not replace — the large volumes of GPUs Meta buys from Nvidia $NVDA and AMD $AMD.
The backdrop to this week's rally is Meta's first-quarter earnings report in April, when the company lifted its 2026 spending forecast to a range of $125 billion to $145 billion and watched its stock shed 7% as Wall Street grew skeptical that the massive infrastructure outlays would translate into meaningful new business lines. This week, Zuckerberg also told Bloomberg that Meta is exploring renting its AI computing capacity to third parties, a move that could open a new revenue stream outside the company's core advertising business.
Meta Superintelligence Labs, led by Alexandr Wang, developed both models. The lab debuted its first model, Muse Spark, in April, replacing the company's open-source Llama family. Even after the weekly surge, the Nasdaq $NDAQ's 13% year-to-date gain still outpaces Meta's performance.