Report: Meta wants to rent out excess capacity from AI data centers

According to a report by the financial news agency Bloomberg, Facebook parent Meta wants to enter the AI cloud infrastructure business. The plan is to rent out the capacities of its currently massively expanded AI data centers that are not needed by the company itself. With its “Meta Compute” initiative, the company aims to build a business segment that sells both access to pure computing capacity and various AI models running in Meta's data centers, according to the report. High-ranking managers such as Head of Infrastructure Santosh Janardhan are reportedly entrusted with the initiative.

This would make Meta a competitor to offerings like Amazon Bedrock on the one hand, and also penetrate the business field of neoclouds like CoreWeave and Nebius on the other. The shares of the latter two companies fell significantly after the publication of the Bloomberg report, while Meta's stock made a short-term leap upwards. Meta did not comment on the report, but Bloomberg cites anonymous insiders.

According to Bloomberg, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg already stated in a conference call in May that the group is considering renting out cloud capacity. “Almost every week there are different companies that come to us from the outside asking us to both stand up an API service or asking if we have compute that they could buy from us at some premium to what we’ve bought it at.”“We haven’t done that yet because we think we have a use for the compute.” However, if the situation changes, the option is on the table.

SpaceX already sells cloud capacities

Meta's move is likely to help make its enormous investments in AI infrastructure profitable. The company revised its spending on AI infrastructure upwards again just three months into the year. For the current year, Meta now anticipates capital expenditures between 125 billion and 145 billion US dollars. The previous range was 115 billion to 135 billion US dollars. In 2025, the group spent around 72 billion US dollars primarily on expanding AI data centers.

Elon Musk's corporate conglomerate SpaceX already operates as an AI cloud provider. The capacities of the data center cluster called “Colossus”, built by the AI company xAI now belonging to SpaceX, are also rented out to Google, Anthropic, and recently to the startup Reflection AI. Anthropic pays SpaceX 1.25 billion US dollars per month for this, and Google pays 920 million US dollars. Some observers see this as a clear sign that xAI's AI models are not in high demand and that the built capacity significantly exceeds its own needs.

(axk)