Meta Platforms shares rose nearly 6% in premarket trading after a report that the company is building a cloud business to sell its excess AI computing capacity.
Bloomberg News, citing people familiar with the matter, said the move could reduce Meta's reliance on advertising and set it against the three firms that dominate cloud infrastructure. For a company that still draws almost all its revenue from ads, that would mark a significant widening of the base.
What Meta is weighing
One option under review is letting customers tap AI models hosted on Meta's own infrastructure. That would resemble Amazon Web Services' Bedrock platform, which sells access to a menu of models on a pay-as-you-go basis.
The idea is not new inside the company. Zuckerberg flagged it at Meta's annual shareholder meeting in May, saying it was "definitely on the table." He said other companies approach Meta almost every week asking to buy access to its models or spare capacity at a premium.
Selling that access would become a live option, he added, if Meta reached a point where it had overbuilt its data-centre capacity.
A hedge against overbuilding
That framing matters. It positions a cloud business less as a bold pivot than as a use for capacity Meta may otherwise leave idle. The company is pouring money into data centres, and a resale market would let it recoup some of that outlay rather than strand it.
The spending numbers behind the strategy are large. Big Tech firms are expected to spend more than $700 billion on AI infrastructure this year, up from around $400 billion in 2025. At that scale, even a modest overbuild leaves a lot of expensive silicon looking for work.
Taking on the incumbents
The move would push Meta into a contest with Amazon, Microsoft and Alphabet, the three companies that have spent a decade building the cloud market. None will cede ground easily, and Meta would arrive as a challenger rather than an equal.
The prize is a revenue stream that does not rise and fall with the advertising cycle. That is the real draw. Meta's ad business is vast but exposed to economic swings and platform shifts, and a cloud arm would give it something steadier to lean on.
