Meta eyes cloud sales for excess AI computing power

Meta Platforms is building a cloud business to sell excess artificial intelligence computing capacity, and the move pushed its shares up more than 6% in premarket trading. The effort would turn a fast-growing internal expense into something closer to a commercial product, putting the Menlo Park company into closer competition with Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.

The pivot comes as Meta has been telling investors how aggressively it is spending on AI. On its April 29 first-quarter earnings call, the company said compute requirements continued to grow and that it would keep investing heavily in AI data centers and cloud capacity. Meta also said it had released its first model from Meta Superintelligence Labs, underscoring how central large-scale infrastructure has become to the company’s AI strategy.

That spending is already enormous. Meta later guided 2026 capital expenditures to between $115 billion and $135 billion, a range that reflects the cost of chips, power and data centers needed to train and run large models. Selling spare capacity would give the company a way to offset part of that outlay if demand from outside customers proves strong enough.

The timing matters because the market for AI compute has become increasingly tight. In May, Anthropic said it would use the full compute capacity of SpaceX’s Colossus 1 data center in Memphis, Tennessee, a deal tied to about 300 megawatts of power and more than 220,000 Nvidia GPUs. That kind of scale is available to only a handful of companies, and it shows how scarce large blocks of AI infrastructure have become.

For Meta, the question is whether the cloud push reflects overbuilding, a direct bid to challenge the established cloud leaders, or a broader shift toward consolidation in which only the richest technology firms can afford enough capacity to train frontier models and then resell the leftovers. However it is framed, the plan suggests Meta is no longer treating AI infrastructure only as a cost center. It is starting to look at it as something it can sell.