Key Takeaways
- AI Reversal: Fastly stock fell 10% to $27 on Thursday, September 24.
- Street Lag: The 12 analysts TIKR tracks carry 4 buys, 1 outperform, 6 holds and 1 underperform, and their $28 mean target sits just 5% above where Fastly stock closed Thursday.
- Model Divergence: TIKR’s mid case values Fastly at $49 by December 2030, implying an 85% total return and a 15% annualized gain from the current price.
- Cushion Gone: Analysts were sitting 31% above Fastly’s price after June’s crash; now that premium has shrunk to 5%, the tightest gap since the stock’s March run-up.
See how the Street’s targets and TIKR’s model each read Fastly’s reversal on TIKR for free →
Why Fastly Stock Sank 10% After Its AI Rally Reversed
Fastly (FSLY) stock dropped 10% to $27 on Thursday, September 24, giving back almost all of Wednesday’s 14% jump after Citi argued the AI traffic driving that rally would not move Fastly’s profit line.
Shares had spiked Wednesday on reports that Fastly’s network powers Muse, the new AI assistant from Meta. Citi analyst Fatima Boolani pushed back the next morning, keeping a neutral rating and telling clients that Fastly bills customers by the gigabyte, not the request, and AI assistants send mostly small, fast queries rather than the large files that actually generate revenue under that model. She added that there is little sign Meta is buying the security products where Fastly earns its highest margins, the same add-ons the company leans on to make delivery traffic profitable.
The reversal landed on a stock already under pressure. Ten-year Treasury yields pushed to their highest levels since 2007 that week, a backdrop that squeezes richly priced growth names like Fastly stock harder than most. Chief Technology Officer Artur Bergman also sold 77,046 shares between September 17 and 22 for roughly $2.1 million, disclosed just a day before the selloff. The sales followed pre-arranged trading plans and left Bergman holding more than 1.5 million shares, but the timing, right after a 164% year-to-date run, fed the sense that insiders were locking in gains the market itself was starting to question. GuruFocus flagged Fastly stock as trading well above its own fair-value model even after the drop, so the pullback barely dented how expensive the stock still looked.
None of that erases what Wednesday’s spike got right: Fastly does sit inside Meta’s AI infrastructure now. What Thursday settled is that sitting inside the traffic path and getting paid for it are two different businesses, and Fastly stock just got repriced for the gap between them.
Fastly Stock’s 2029 Targets Feed the Same AI Doubts
Investor Day only widened the same doubt, two trading days earlier. On Tuesday, September 22, management laid out targets for 2029: $1.1 billion to $1.3 billion in revenue, 14% to 21% annual growth and operating margins of 20% to 22%, while reiterating 2026 guidance of $732 million to $746 million. The targets lean on the same AI and security story Citi picked apart Thursday, and Fastly’s own chief financial officer, Richard Wong, had previewed the tension nine days earlier at a Piper Sandler conference.
Machine traffic, he told investors, is “growing faster” than human traffic on a request basis, but it is “still a very small portion of gigabytes transferred,” the exact metric Fastly bills on. Wong pointed to security, not raw delivery, as the “nearest-term beneficiary” of AI traffic, a stream that grew 43% year over year last quarter. The market spent Tuesday through Thursday deciding whether that distinction, drawn by Fastly’s own finance chief, was reason to trust the 2029 math or doubt it.
Stress-test Fastly’s 2029 revenue math against today’s AI doubts on TIKR for free →
Fastly Stock’s Analyst Target Gap Just Slammed Shut
Fastly’s 12 analysts hold 4 buys, 1 outperform, 6 holds and 1 underperform, with a $28 mean target just 5% above Thursday’s close, the thinnest cushion since single digits. That gap swung from 53% below price in March to 31% above it in June, and has now collapsed to 5% as the rally outran the Street again.
TIKR Values Fastly Stock at $49, Well Above Wall Street
TIKR’s mid case model values Fastly stock at $49 by December 2030, implying an 85% total return from the current price of $27, or a 15% annualized gain over the next 4.3 years.
That kind of annualized return is what growth investors demand from a company still proving out a new profit engine, not a settled compounder coasting on legacy delivery revenue.
The $21 gap between TIKR’s $49 target and the Street’s $28 mean is the entire debate Thursday’s selloff opened. Sell-side coverage is pricing what AI and security adoption look like over the next year, while TIKR’s model is pricing whether the roadmap Wong described, and the one management just spent an Investor Day defending, actually compounds through 2030.
Run TIKR’s $49 target and 85% return case for Fastly stock for free →
Should You Invest in Fastly, Inc.?
The only way to really know is to look at the numbers yourself. TIKR gives you free access to the same institutional-quality financial data that professional analysts use to answer exactly that question.
Pull up Fastly, Inc. stock and you’ll see years of historical financials, what Wall Street analysts expect for revenue and earnings in the quarters ahead, how valuation multiples have moved over time, and whether price targets are trending up or down.
You can build a free watchlist to track Fastly, Inc. alongside every other stock on your radar. No credit card required. Just the data you need to decide for yourself.
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Disclaimer:
Please note that the articles on TIKR are not intended to serve as investment or financial advice from TIKR or our content team, nor are they recommendations to buy or sell any stocks. We create our content based on TIKR Terminal’s investment data and analysts’ estimates. Our analysis might not include recent company news or important updates. TIKR has no position in any stocks mentioned. Thank you for reading, and happy investing!
