Meta has spent billions of dollars developing AI and building data centers to support it. But now, the company may be preparing to put those data centers to a more immediately profitable purpose.
On Wednesday, Bloomberg reported that Meta is developing plans for a cloud infrastructure business, selling access to both AI computing power and models. The move will put it at odds with major cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.
Meta’s decision to sell off excess computers comes weeks after SpaceX, via xAI, announced similar plans. In early May, SpaceX signed an agreement with Anthropic to acquire all of the computing capacity at SpaceX’s Colossus 1 data center. SpaceX has since signed similar leases with Google and Reflection AI. The fact that Meta is doing the same is a sign that the winners of the AI race may not be those who provide the best models and services, but those who own the data centers.
That is, if demand for PCs continues to hold up and if data centers hold their value. Some skeptics have warned that the race to build AI infrastructure is creating a tipping bubble largely in rapidly depreciating brands. Others have questioned whether AI companies can generate enough end-user revenue to justify their trillion-dollar bets.
These concerns haven’t stopped Meta from investing heavily in AI computing infrastructure. From the end of the first quarter Meta had pledged to spend $182.9 billion on AI infrastructure in the coming years, including massive ongoing projects Louisiana and Ohio. The Ohio project, which Zuckerberg said would be the size of Manhattanexpected to be released this year.
Unlike Google and OpenAI, Meta has not seen significant demand for its own AI models and services. Meta doesn’t break out its revenue from Meta AI or Llama, the open-weighted AI model family, in its earnings, and executives have mostly emphasized internal corporate uses of AI in public statements. This could mean that Meta’s AI efforts do not yet represent a material standalone revenue line.
To recoup some of its own colossal spending, Meta may copy CoreWeave’s business model and sell access to “raw” computing capacity, according to Bloomberg. The outlet also reported that Meta is considering following AWS’s lead and selling access to various AI models — including its recently launched closed-weight model, Muse Spark — hosted on AI infrastructure.
The new business line will be part of a new initiative reportedly called Meta Compute, which is led by chief infrastructure officer Santosh Janardhan, head of Meta Superintelligence Labs Daniel Gross and president Dina Powell McCormick.
The report confirms Zuckerberg’s statements in May that it is a Meta cloud computing business “Sure on the table” as a way to win back some of the massive investment in its strategy to develop artificial intelligence “superintelligence.”
TechCrunch has reached out to Meta for comment.
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