As Meta Platforms Inc.’s stock bounces further off its lows of the year, it has found an additional defender in the form of a BNP Paribas analyst who says the company’s artificial-intelligence spending will pay off.

Meta

META is different from its fellow big spenders in Big Tech because the company doesn’t have a cloud-computing business. For that reason, some on Wall Street have grown concerned that the company won’t be able to effectively monetize the swelling budget it has allocated toward AI. But BNP Paribas analyst Nick Jones took a different view, initiating coverage of Meta shares with an outperform rating on Monday.