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Meta, like SpaceX, looks to turn excess AI compute into cash
Meta is developing plans to launch a cloud infrastructure business, selling access to both AI compute power and models, Bloomberg reported Wednesday. The move would pit the social media giant against major cloud providers like Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure, and follows a similar announcement by SpaceX's xAI in early May, which signed a deal with Anthropic to buy out all compute capacity at SpaceX's Colossus 1 data center. The decision signals that the winners of the AI race may not be those with the best models, but those who own data centers—if demand for compute holds and data centers retain their value. However, skeptics warn of a potential bubble built on rapidly depreciating chips, questioning whether AI companies can generate enough end-user revenue to justify trillion-dollar investments. Despite these concerns, Meta has invested heavily in AI infrastructure, committing $182.9 billion to future spending, including massive projects in Louisiana and Ohio. The Ohio facility, which CEO Mark Zuckerberg said would be the size of Manhattan, is expected to come online this year. Unlike Google and OpenAI, Meta has not reported significant demand for its own AI models, such as Meta AI or the open-weight Llama family, and has not broken out AI revenue in earnings, instead emphasizing internal corporate uses. To monetize its colossal spend, Meta may follow CoreWeave's model by selling "raw" compute capacity, and consider offering access to various AI models—including its closed-weight Muse Spark—hosted on its infrastructure, similar to AWS. The new business line, reportedly dubbed Meta Compute, will be led by infrastructure head Santosh Janardhan, Meta Superintelligence Labs leader Daniel Gross, and president Dina Powell McCormick. The report confirms Zuckerberg's May statements that a cloud computing business is "definitely on the table" as a way to return on investment in AI "superintelligence." TechCrunch has reached out to Meta for comment.