Meta building cloud business to sell excess AI compute

Meta Platforms ↘ 0.23% is developing a cloud infrastructure business to sell excess AI computing capacity to outside customers, Bloomberg News reported on Wednesday, sending shares up more than 8% in premarket trading and putting the social media giant in direct competition with Amazon Web Services Amazon.com, Inc. ↘ 0.28%, Microsoft ↗ 0.73% Azure, and Google Cloud Alphabet Inc. ↗ 0.55%.

The company is exploring a dual approach to monetizing its vast data center investments, according to people familiar with the matter cited by Bloomberg. One option involves selling access to AI models hosted on Meta's infrastructure — including its own Muse Spark models — in a manner similar to AWS's Bedrock platform. The second involves selling raw computing capacity, positioning Meta against neocloud providers like CoreWeave ↘ 3.18%.news.bloomberglaw+2

A Long-Telegraphed Move

The plans are being developed under Meta Compute, an internal initiative CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced in January to oversee the company's AI infrastructure buildout. That effort is led by Santosh Janardhan, Meta's head of global infrastructure; Daniel Gross, the former Safe Superintelligence co-founder who joined Meta last year; and Meta President Dina Powell McCormick, who focuses on government partnerships for data center deployment.axios+2

Zuckerberg had been signaling the possibility for months. At Meta's annual shareholder meeting in late May, he said entering the cloud market was "definitely on the table" if the company found itself with surplus capacity after its aggressive buildout. At the time, he noted that Meta did not yet have excess compute to offer externally.cnbc+1

The Scale of the Bet

Meta has committed enormous resources to AI infrastructure. The company raised its 2026 capital expenditure forecast in April to between $125 billion and $145 billion, up from an already elevated $115 billion to $135 billion disclosed in January. Zuckerberg has said Meta plans to build "tens of gigawatts" of computing capacity this decade.techcrunch+3

The news weighed on shares of established cloud providers, according to Investing.com. Unlike its hyperscaler rivals, Meta has never operated a commercial cloud platform — its infrastructure has historically served only internal products. A successful entry would transform what has been a cost center into a potential revenue stream, though the company would need to build out enterprise sales, support, and security capabilities that it currently lacks.datafloq+1

Reuters noted it could not independently verify the Bloomberg report.finance.yahoo