SAN FRANCISCO: Shares of Meta Platforms jumped more than six percent on Wall Street Wednesday after a report said the social media giant is preparing to launch a cloud computing business that would sell AI computing power to outside customers.
The report, published by Bloomberg, said Meta is developing plans to compete directly with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud by monetizing the excess computing capacity it has built up while racing to develop artificial intelligence.
The company would also sell its own internally designed AI models to business customers for their own use, a major emerging market for the cloud computing giants.
Meta has poured hundreds of billions of dollars into data centers and AI chips as it pursues what CEO Mark Zuckerberg has called "superintelligence," spending that has fueled investor concerns about how the company will generate returns.
The company, which has struck major computing deals with CoreWeave, Google and Oracle, had seen its share price lose ground in recent months due to AI overspending concerns.
Zuckerberg has previously signaled openness to selling excess computing capacity or launching a service that would charge business customers for AI usage measured in tokens.
"It's definitely on the table," Zuckerberg told shareholders on an earnings call in May.
Rival Elon Musk's SpaceX, which includes his AI startup xAI, ahead of an IPO last month began renting capacity from its Memphis data center to Anthropic and struck a deal with Google.
The moves could bring in tens of billions of dollars in revenue and help reassure investors as spending on AI infrastructure becomes an increasing source of worry, with returns on investment not near the levels needed to break even.
In the race to lead on AI, Meta has lagged behind Google, OpenAI and Anthropic, with the company's own models, often delayed, proving disappointing.
Zuckerberg invested over $14 billion last year into Scale AI, a San Francisco-based startup, and poached its CEO, Alexandr Wang -- who was 28-years-old at the time -- to run the AI lab inside Meta.
He has also poached top talent from his competitors.
