Bloomberg News reported on the 1st (local time), citing sources familiar with the matter, that Meta, Facebook's parent company, will enter the cloud business to sell surplus artificial intelligence (AI) computing resources and AI models to external customers. If Meta enters the cloud business, competition with existing major cloud providers—Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud—appears inevitable.
According to the report, Meta is preparing "Meta Compute," a cloud business model that creates a new revenue stream by selling surplus compute support from the data center infrastructure it built for its own AI development to external customers.
Meta's plan falls broadly into two tracks. Meta will run its latest AI model, "Muse Spark," using its own AI Semiconductor and data centers, and is reviewing a plan to charge fees so external developers can use the model in the form of an application programming interface (API). This is a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) similar to AWS's "Bedrock," MS Azure's "AI Foundry," and Google Cloud's "Vertex AI."
In addition, Meta is reportedly pursuing a business to lease pure compute resources to external clients. This is similar to the neo-cloud business model of CoreWeave and Nevious, which provide AI-specialized infrastructure to corporations.
On news that Meta is considering entering the cloud business, the company's stock jumped 8.8% that day. It is seen as a result of easing concerns among investors about a recent "AI overinvestment."
Meta has aggressively invested in AI infrastructure such as data centers and semiconductors with the goal of developing "superintelligence." This year alone, it is expected to invest $145 billion (about 225 trillion won) in AI infrastructure. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has repeatedly emphasized that "overinvestment is better than not investing enough." At the shareholders' meeting on May, he hinted at a potential entry into the cloud business, saying, "If the time comes when we judge that we overbuilt the infrastructure, we can consider selling surplus resources externally to reduce risk."
There is also an assessment that if Meta actually enters the cloud business, the market structure long led by AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud could be shaken. Among the four corporations operating large-scale AI data centers, Meta is the only one that does not provide cloud services. It is also expected to form a competitive landscape with neo-cloud corporations centered on GPU rentals, such as CoreWeave and Nevious.
Earlier, xAI, led by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, also recently decided to lease the compute resources of the mega data center "Colossus" in Memphis, Tennessee, to Anthropic and Google on a long-term basis, showing how new revenue models leveraging AI infrastructure are spreading.