- Meta Compute could see the company sell off its excess compute
- The company expects to spend $125-145 billion on AI and data centers this year
- SpaceX recently struck up two very lucrative deals to sell compute to Anthropic, Google Cloud
Meta is reportedly looking at selling the compute capacity it has created during its AI-induced data center expansions, and it could launch a business to rival AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.
A report from Bloomberg claims the new businesses, reportedly internally named Meta Compute, would see the company rent out excess compute capacity.
Though Meta hasn't officially confirmed such plans, a cloud computing business could allow customers to rent GPUs for AI training and inference, access Meta's models or host their own models on Meta's infrastructure.
Is Meta going to launch its own cloud computing business?
Meta anticipates spending $125-145 billion on AI and data centers in 2026, and a cloud business could help offset some of the AI infrastructure costs it's faced up to this point. It would also provide extra revenue when the company's GPUs are sitting idle between workloads.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg himself even refused to write off the possibility. "It's definitely on the table," he told investors on an earnings call.
If Zuckerberg okays the business, it wouldn't be the first of its kind. SpaceX also recently struck up deals with Anthropic and Google Cloud to sell its excess capacity. It would likely see instant success as well, because even industry giants like Microsoft are struggling to meet their own demands.
GitHub recently had to turn to AWS for extra capacity, with Azure failing to meet demands in the short term.
Meta has been struggle with share prices for several months, and while this recent news didn't trigger a full recovery, share prices did rise around 9-10% following reports indicating that shareholders are feeling more confident in the company's massive AI-related spending habits.
