Meta shares jumped nearly 10% on Wednesday following a report that the company is planning to sell excess computing power, allowing the tech giant to recover some of the billions of dollars it has invested in artificial intelligence infrastructure.
The Menlo Park, California-based company is building a new cloud business to sell access to its AI models and compute capacity, according to Bloomberg. The report sent Meta’s stock sharply higher as investors welcomed the prospect of new revenue streams from the company’s massive AI investments.
The new cloud business would allow Meta to generate revenue on any leftover capacity, setting it up to compete with industry leaders like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, CoreWeave, and SpaceX. Meta is debating whether the cloud business should sell access to its own AI models or to raw computing power itself, according to the report, which noted that plans could change.
If Meta decides to sell access to AI models on its own infrastructure, it would take a similar approach to Amazon, running data centers and chips that power AI bots and charging customers fees to access them. Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which took over his AI firm xAI in February, has adopted a similar approach, striking lucrative rental deals with Anthropic at $1.25 billion a month and Google at $920 million monthly, as reported by the New York Post.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg signaled an openness to selling excess power at the annual shareholder meeting in May. “It’s definitely on the table,” Zuckerberg said. “Almost every week there are different companies that come to us from the outside asking us to both stand up an API service or asking if we have compute that they could buy from us at some premium to what we’ve bought it at.”
The report comes as investors have grown increasingly anxious about whether Meta can deliver returns on the hundreds of billions of dollars spent building computing capacity. In April, shares slid after the company raised its spending forecast to $145 billion amid fears that AI stocks are overvalued. Zuckerberg has repeatedly insisted it is crucial to build as much computing capacity as possible, given limited supply.
Last summer, Meta paid $15 billion to hire AI researcher Alexandr Wang and take a 49% stake in his startup, Scale AI. The company released its first AI model under Wang’s lead in April, though the “Muse Spark” model did not meet expectations for a state-of-the-art bot. Wang has defended the model, calling it an “appetizer” while Meta is “cooking” up the main course, according to the New York Post.
