The Q2 2026 numbers, Aug. 27 -- Meta Platforms was an island of calm in Tuesday's tech turbulence. The stock settled at $607.44, barely changed from Monday's close, as the rest of the Nasdaq sold off ahead of NVIDIA's earnings. The stability reflects something unusual for a company of Meta's scale: an advertising business growing faster than the broader digital ad market, combined with AI investments that are beginning to contribute directly to that growth rather than just consuming capital.

up 22% year-over-year. The growth rate was not the headline. The headline was that Meta's AI-powered ad targeting improvements - specifically the Andromeda retrieval system and the GEM model, both deployed across Facebook and Instagram's ad delivery ...