Meta is designing a cloud computing business to sell excess capacity in its AI data centers to third parties, it has been reported. advanced Bloomberg. The company values two ways:
- Offer access to models hosted on your infrastructure.
- Or rent computing power directly, in the style of neoclouds.
The panoramic. Zuckerberg has been hinting at this move for some time. At the May shareholders meeting he said that competing in cloud was “definitely on the table” and that there were companies asking him “almost every week” if they could buy computing from him. Now that balloon probe is a business plan.
- The service would include access to Muse SparkMeta’s own model that still does not have a release date for external developers.
- Renting raw GPU power is also being studied, the business model of CoreWeave and Nebius.
Why is it important. Meta has built, between 2023 and 2026, one of the largest computing infrastructures in the world almost alone, without external partners or clients to make it profitable. 98% of its income still comes from advertising.
Turning those data centers into a product that is sold, and not just an assumed cost, is the first public sign that Meta needs another source of income to justify the outlay.
In figures:
- Goal has risen to 145,000 million dollars its infrastructure spending forecast for 2026, 10 billion more than expected in January.
- Your actions They have risen more than 9% After hearing the news, their best session in more than five months, although they have had a subsequent correction.
- Meta’s gross margin is 82%, and the operating margin is 41%. The business of cloud Google, on the other hand, operates with a margin of 18%, compared to 42% for its advertising division.
- CoreWeave is down 10.8% and Nebius 12.4% on the stock market, due to the fear of losing Meta as a client and gaining it as a competitor.
Between the lines. The clearest parallel is with SpaceX. Musk’s company, owner of xAI, has begun renting capacity in its data centers to Google and Anthropic for more than $2 billion per month between the two companies.
Both companies share a pattern: they have trained LLMs own without getting the market to adopt them en masse, and now they monetize what is left over instead of what they produce.
The contrast. Google is the mirror in which Meta looks, and it is not a pretty mirror. He launched his business cloud in 2008, made it public in 2011 and It did not give benefits until 2023. Fifteen years for the calculation to give money. Meta would have to build from scratch a sales and technical support team that it does not have today, something very different from selling advertising space in an automated way as it has been doing.
Yes, but. It is not something that should be interpreted solely as a sign of weakness. If you are going to build capacity anyway, it is rational not to leave it idle but to turn it into an asset. Zuckerberg himself framed it this way in May, when he explained that domestic demand had so far absorbed all available capacity. Not anymore.
And now what. The question that remains on the table is which side Meta wants to be on: the one that competes to build the best model, or the one that sells infrastructure to those who can achieve it.
A few months ago, Google cut off access to Gemini due to lack of capacity and forced Meta to ration its consumption. tokens among its own employees. Selling computing today also means stopping depending on others to sell to it.
Featured image | Xataka
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