shares of Meta Shares soared 10% Wednesday on news that the company is building a new cloud business that could help it recoup some of the billions it has poured into artificial intelligence infrastructure.
CNBC’s Jim Cramer confirmed that Meta will sell excess computing power to outside customers. Bloomberg first reported the news.
According to Bloomberg, the company is debating whether to offer access to AI models hosted on its infrastructure or sell access to raw computing power.
A representative for Meta did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
Since OpenAI launched the AI boom in 2022 with the launch of its ChatGPT chatbot, model developers including Meta have been racing to secure computing power, with demand far outstripping supply. Meta told investors in April that it plans to spend up to $145 billion in capital expenditures this year to continue developing its data centers and securing the graphics processing units needed to train AI models and run large-scale workloads.
By launching a cloud business, Meta could generate revenue from unused capacity, a welcome signal for some investors worried about the company’s spending plans. This new business will place Meta into a new, highly competitive market dominated by: Amazon, microsoft, google and core weaveamong others.
With neo-cloud company CoreWeave nevius group Both fell sharply following the meta news, each dropping about 12%.
Mark Zuckerberg first hinted at the possibility of cloud migration in the company’s Q3 2025 earnings, and mentioned it again at Meta’s annual shareholder meeting in May.
“That’s definitely on the table,” Zuckerberg told investors, adding that if Meta gets to the point where it over-builds its AI infrastructure, “that’s an option we have.”
Meta is following Elon Musk space xalso started selling excess computing power this year. The company struck lucrative deals with Anthropic, which agreed to pay $1.25 billion per month for capacity, and Google, which agreed to pay $920 million per month.
Despite spending $14 billion last year to hire Alexandr Wang from Scale AI, Meta has struggled to gain a foothold in the AI industry. The company debuted its first model, Muse Spark, under Wang’s leadership in April, but characterized it as a “strong foundation” rather than a cutting-edge product.
—CNBC’s Julia Boorstin contributed to this article.
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