Meta Stock Posts Best Month Since 2022 as Muse AI App Fuels Rally

Meta's stock closed at $725.18 on Wednesday, capping a 27% gain for September — the company's best month since November 2022 and its fifth-best month on record.

The rally marks a sharp vote of confidence from Wall Street in Meta's artificial intelligence strategy. Shares rose from $572.34 at the end of August, outperforming every other megacap technology stock and trouncing the Nasdaq, which gained almost 2% over the same stretch.

The catalyst was the September 8 launch of Muse, Meta's personal AI agent app. Muse became a major hit and topped rival OpenAI's ChatGPT in Apple iOS downloads — a notable benchmark given that OpenAI's app has dominated consumer AI adoption since late 2022.

There is historical symmetry in the timing. The last time Meta stock had a bigger month was November 2022, the month OpenAI launched ChatGPT. That rally came as Meta rebounded from a brutal year and kicked off its efficiency push. Now investors are rewarding Meta for leading, rather than reacting to, an AI product cycle.

Muse as the "centerpiece"

At its annual Connect developer conference in September, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg framed Muse as central to the company's future. He characterized the agent as a "centerpiece" for Meta's product and business strategy, while also revealing new hardware products including the Muse Charm AI pendant.

The stakes are substantial. The AI agent market is nascent, but Meta and its rivals are racing to build businesses in it before the category consolidates. OpenAI debuted its own Dots agent tools on Tuesday, signaling that competition for enterprise and consumer agent workloads is intensifying across the industry.

A push into the enterprise

Meta is also moving beyond consumers. This week the company hired MongoDB CEO CJ Desai to head a new business unit called Meta Enterprise Platform, and it debuted Muse for Small Business agent technologies aimed at smaller companies.

The Desai hire signals that Meta intends to compete directly in enterprise AI — a market where it has historically had little presence compared with Microsoft, Google and Amazon. Analysts see a plausible path in.

"The enterprise AI solutions market, including cloud capacity, is expected to exceed $1trn by 2028, and we think Meta's consumer data and communications apps could give Meta's advantages for AI enterprise sales to consumer-focused companies," BofA Global Research analysts wrote in a Monday note. "We would expect distribution of Meta's model APIs on leading hyperscaler platforms."

That $1 trillion figure frames why a single hit app has moved Meta's market value so dramatically. If agent-based AI becomes the primary interface for consumer and business software, the companies that control distribution — app stores rankings, messaging platforms, workplace tools — hold leverage over the entire stack.

Why it matters

Meta's September performance resets expectations for how investors value the company's AI spending. For the past two years, Wall Street has debated whether Meta's tens of billions in AI infrastructure investment would translate into products users actually adopt. Muse topping ChatGPT in iOS downloads is the clearest evidence yet that it can.

The question now is durability. A strong month of downloads does not guarantee sustained engagement or revenue, and OpenAI's Dots launch shows rivals will not cede the agent market quietly. Meta's next test is converting Muse's consumer momentum — and its new enterprise unit under Desai — into the durable AI business that analysts at BofA believe could ride a market exceeding $1 trillion by 2028.