Last year, Meta had to reckon with an ugly conclusion about its Chinese advertising customers: They were defrauding Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp users worldwide. Though China's authoritarian government bans use of Meta social media by its citizens, Beijing lets Chinese companies advertise to foreign consumers on the globe-spanning platforms. As a result, Meta's advertising business was thriving in China, ultimately reaching over $18 billion in annual sales in 2024, more than a tenth of the company's global revenue. But Meta calculated that about 19% of that money - more than $3 billion - was coming from ads for scams, illegal gambling, pornography and other banned content, according to internal Meta documents reviewed by Reuters.
Matt Wasserlauf, CEO, BlockboardThere is no bigger buzzword in the world than AI. Right now, investments in the hundreds of billions of dollars are rolling in to pay for chips, data centers and people to build out artificial intelligence. NVIDIA, the leading AI chip-maker, just became the first five trillion-dollar company. Many on Wall Street are calling this development a bubble that could take down the entire economy. The stakes are very high.
