It turns out that while companies are trying to be the biggest and the fastest in AI, selling the leftovers is where a lot of the money is.
Meta is building a cloud computing business and plans to sell excess compute to its competitors, Bloomberg reported Wednesday. The move is a signal that Meta doesn’t have enough usage of its own AI models, even as it spent gobs of (often borrowed) money on building data centers. The company’s shares jumped by more than 10% as investors cheered the promise that Meta might be able to recoup some of the $600 billion it’s pledged to spend by 2028.
Meta’s compute business is also the latest manifestation of the circular economy in the AI race, like SpaceX’s recent decision to rent out data center space to Anthropic. With Meta’s models falling behind, becoming a cloud provider keeps it relevant in AI and buys it time to develop its own technology.