Meta stock has already rallied sharply in September, but Citi thinks the next major catalyst could arrive within days. The bank kept its Buy rating and $800 price target on Meta Platforms while placing the shares on a 90-day positive catalyst watch ahead of Meta Connect, scheduled for September 23. Citi analyst Ronald Josey expects the event to deliver updates across artificial intelligence, smart glasses and Meta’s broader product strategy, potentially giving investors a clearer picture of how the company plans to turn its enormous AI spending into products capable of generating revenue beyond advertising. Meta shares were trading around $676 on September 16, up roughly 10% from September 8, meaning Citi’s target still implies substantial upside even after the recent run.
The timing makes Connect unusually important. Meta is currently spending at a pace that would have been almost unimaginable only a few years ago, with 2026 capital expenditures expected to reach $125 billion to $145 billion as the company expands data centers, buys AI infrastructure and builds out Meta Superintelligence Labs. At the same time, the company’s core advertising engine remains exceptionally strong, giving CEO Mark Zuckerberg the financial firepower to pursue AI agents, custom chips and wearable computing simultaneously. The market has tolerated that spending because revenue continues to grow quickly, but investors increasingly want evidence that Meta’s AI investments are becoming consumer products and revenue streams rather than simply larger server farms. Meta Connect may be the event where that monetization story becomes considerably more tangible.
Citi’s $800 Target Is Really a Bet on Ad Business
Meta’s advertising business remains the foundation underneath virtually everything else the company is attempting. Revenue reached about $60.8 billion in the second quarter of 2026, rising 28% year over year, while daily users across Meta’s family of apps reached roughly 3.6 billion. That scale gives Meta something few AI competitors possess: billions of existing users, enormous advertiser relationships and a highly profitable distribution network capable of pushing new AI features into products people already use every day. Even before Meta generates substantial direct revenue from personal AI agents or glasses, machine learning already contributes financially by improving ad targeting, recommendations and engagement across Facebook and Instagram.
Citi’s enthusiasm therefore does not require investors to believe Meta suddenly becomes a hardware company. The more compelling argument is that Meta can use AI to reinforce advertising while gradually creating additional businesses layered on top of its existing network. Meta has recently launched the Muse personal AI agent and Meta One subscription packages, providing two examples of how that strategy could work. Muse is designed not merely to answer questions but to perform tasks on a user’s behalf, while Meta One bundles higher AI usage and premium features across the company’s applications. Meta says the subscription ecosystem has already accumulated 15 million subscriptions and trials. Connect could show how those offerings eventually integrate with glasses, messaging and Meta’s broader ecosystem, potentially turning AI from a cost center into another layer of monetization.
The Product That Makes Meta’s AI Strategy Visible
The biggest near-term product opportunity may be sitting directly on users’ faces. Meta has spent years developing smart glasses with EssilorLuxottica, and the category has evolved from what once looked like an experimental Reality Labs project into one of the company’s most promising consumer hardware businesses. Meta said in July that millions of people now use its AI glasses every day for music, photos, video and access to Meta AI. The company expanded that lineup this summer with new Meta Glasses starting at $299 and powered by its Muse Spark model, signaling that wearables are becoming increasingly central to the way Zuckerberg imagines consumers interacting with AI.
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Connect could now broaden that strategy substantially. Reuters reported on September 15 that Meta is preparing a camera-free pair of smart glasses, internally known as Luna, potentially launching this fall. Removing the camera could address one of the biggest barriers to mass adoption: privacy concerns surrounding people wearing always-available recording devices in public. The reported glasses would retain microphones and AI functionality while appearing more like ordinary eyewear. The Information report cited by Reuters has not been confirmed by Meta, but the timing immediately before Connect has increased expectations that hardware announcements could feature prominently at the event.
There is also speculation around a more advanced project known as Phoenix, which appears to sit somewhere between lightweight glasses and a traditional mixed-reality headset. Images apparently discovered in Meta software suggest a glasses-style device connected to an external compute unit, although a commercial launch is reportedly not expected until 2027. If Meta discusses either Luna or Phoenix at Connect, investors could begin treating the company’s hardware roadmap less like a collection of Reality Labs experiments and more like a coordinated attempt to establish the next major computing platform.
The Bull Case
Meta has always had a distribution advantage, but the release of Muse makes that advantage potentially much more powerful. The company introduced Muse on September 8 as a personal AI agent that can use a secure virtual machine and browser to work on projects, manage tasks and interact with applications on behalf of users. That moves Meta beyond the chatbot model and into the increasingly competitive market for autonomous AI agents. If AI agents become a primary way users navigate the internet, Meta wants Muse to sit alongside products from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and others rather than becoming merely a source of training data or advertising inventory for someone else’s assistant.
Wall Street has already begun treating Muse as a more serious catalyst. J.P. Morgan recently upgraded Meta to Overweight and raised its price target to $820, according to MarketWatch, pointing to the company’s improving position in consumer-facing AI. That broader analyst optimism matters because the investment debate around Meta is changing. During earlier phases of the AI boom, the primary question was whether AI would improve engagement and advertising economics enough to justify higher infrastructure spending. Now the question is whether Meta can create a direct consumer AI franchise of its own. If Connect demonstrates that Muse, Meta One and smart glasses are converging into a coherent ecosystem, the company could begin establishing an AI revenue story that extends well beyond advertising optimization.
Meta’s AI Bill Is Becoming Difficult to Ignore
That optimism is expensive. Meta’s free cash flow collapsed to just $784 million in the second quarter from $8.55 billion a year earlier as AI-related infrastructure spending accelerated. Revenue continued growing rapidly, but the amount of cash being consumed by data centers, chips and other investments raised one of the most important questions surrounding Meta stock: how long can spending grow dramatically faster than the cash the business generates after investment? Meta expects 2026 capex to reach as much as $145 billion, and the company is simultaneously investing heavily in technical talent, custom chips and long-term infrastructure capacity.
Meta is also trying to reduce some of its dependence on external chip suppliers. Reuters reported in July that the company planned to put a custom AI chip known internally as Iris into production in September as part of an effort to double computing capacity to roughly 14 gigawatts by 2027. Meta expects to deploy around 7 gigawatts of computing infrastructure in 2026 alone and is pursuing a rapid cadence of internally designed accelerators. The strategy could eventually lower costs and improve efficiency, but it also highlights the sheer scale of the infrastructure bet Zuckerberg is making.
Connect therefore matters because investors need more than demonstrations. Every new consumer AI feature provides another potential justification for the capital bill. If Meta can show that personal agents and smart glasses are creating new subscriptions, commerce opportunities or advertising surfaces, the investment starts looking more like an early-stage growth engine. If the products remain impressive but financially peripheral, scrutiny of spending could intensify.
Meta’s Advantage Is That Advertising Can Finance the Experiment
Meta’s biggest protection against investor impatience is the profitability of Facebook and Instagram. The company’s core platforms continue to generate enough cash to finance investments that would overwhelm smaller AI companies, while Meta also benefits from its enormous installed base. It does not need to acquire hundreds of millions of users for every new AI service from scratch. It can distribute features through applications that billions of people already open regularly, reducing one of the largest costs facing standalone AI startups.
This is why Connect does not need to produce an immediate multibillion-dollar revenue forecast to matter for Meta stock. What investors need is evidence that the pieces fit together. Muse provides an agent. Meta One provides a subscription structure. Smart glasses provide a potential always-available interface. Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook provide distribution. Meta’s advertising system provides monetization infrastructure, while the company’s data centers and custom chips provide the compute behind everything. Each product looks less important in isolation than it does when viewed as part of one vertically integrated consumer AI platform.
The risk is that Meta spends aggressively across all of those areas without creating a product powerful enough to change user behavior. That is the same criticism investors made about the metaverse strategy, and Reality Labs remains a reminder that Meta is capable of spending tens of billions of dollars on ambitious technologies long before their economics become clear.
A 5% Treasury Yield Raises the Stakes for Connect
Meta is also facing a less forgiving market backdrop. The Federal Reserve raised interest rates on September 16 for the first time in three years, and the 10-year Treasury yield has been hovering around 5%. Higher rates tend to hurt expensive growth stocks because they increase the discount rate applied to future earnings, while also giving investors a much more attractive risk-free alternative. Meta has held up better than many growth companies recently because revenue remains strong and AI enthusiasm has improved, but higher yields raise the threshold for what investors need to see from new product investments.
That makes Meta Connect more consequential than a conventional technology launch event. If investors were operating in an environment of falling rates and abundant liquidity, they might be more willing to give Meta years to prove that its AI spending can generate direct returns. With yields around 5%, every incremental dollar invested in long-dated projects receives greater scrutiny. Meta needs to show that its infrastructure spending is creating economically meaningful products quickly enough to justify the capital.
Meta Stock’s Next Test Comes September 23
Citi’s $800 price target ultimately rests on a straightforward argument: Meta already has one of the strongest advertising businesses in the world, and AI could create additional layers of growth rather than merely defend the existing franchise. Connect is a near-term catalyst because it may show investors how the company intends to connect its software, hardware and AI strategy into something consumers actually use.
The event could deliver new smart glasses, more detail on Muse, updates to Meta AI, developer announcements and a clearer roadmap for mixed-reality hardware. Any one announcement may have limited financial impact on its own. What matters is whether Meta can demonstrate that these products belong to one ecosystem capable of increasing engagement, subscriptions, commerce or advertising opportunities.
That is the tension behind Meta stock at roughly $676. The company’s core business is strong, AI products are moving rapidly, and Wall Street analysts such as Citi see meaningful upside. But capital spending is enormous, free cash flow has come under severe pressure, and interest rates have moved higher.
September 23 may not decide whether Meta’s AI strategy succeeds. But it could decide whether investors become more comfortable paying for that strategy today.
If Connect reveals that Meta has found a consumer interface for AI that billions of people might actually use, Citi’s $800 target will have a much clearer product story behind it.
If the event delivers mostly prototypes and promises, investors may quickly return to the number Meta can no longer hide: the extraordinary amount of cash required to build the future Zuckerberg is selling.
Disclaimer
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial or investment advice. Readers should conduct their own research and, where appropriate, consult a qualified financial advisor before making investment decisions. This article was researched and drafted with the support of AI, then reviewed, fact-checked and edited by the editorial team before publication.
