You know the old adage: Those who can, do; those who can’t, rent their space to those who can. According to a report from Bloomberg, Meta is considering getting into the cloud computing business, renting out its infrastructure to other companies that want access to computing power for their AI operations, as the company continues to struggle to get its own model to compete with the frontier labs.
Per Bloomberg, Meta is exploring two primary potential arrangements for its prospective new business, which is apparently being called Meta Compute inside the company. One option would be to sell access to AI models hosted on Meta’s own data center infrastructure. The other would be to sell “raw” compute capacity that other companies could then run their own models on.
Gizmodo reached out to Meta for comment on its reported new business venture but did not receive a response at the time of publication.
The move to potentially open up its infrastructure to others comes as Meta has struggled to get its own AI models off the ground. The company has repeatedly reorganized its AI division, thrown massive multi-million-dollar bags at researchers and experts, and laid off hundreds of people in an attempt to consolidate its focus on building AI models that could compete with the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic. None of it has been particularly successful.
Earlier this year, the company released its new flagship model Muse Spark, and while it performed well enough in benchmark testing, it has struggled to gain any real traction. Meta’s AI chief, Alexandr Wang, has recently called the model an “appetizer” for what Meta will have to offer. But at this point, there seems to be little reason to believe that is actually the case, rather than just marketing speak that covers up how far behind its competitors the company has fallen.
That’s not great for a company that has pledged about $145 billion in AI infrastructure spending this year alone, so it’s no wonder Meta is looking at ways to squeeze some money out of all that investment. It seems it’s looking to SpaceX and its folded-in AI firm, xAI, as a model. After it became clear that Grok simply wasn’t competitive with frontier models at anything but generating non-consensual porn, the company pivoted to renting out its massive Colossus data center to Anthropic for it to run its AI model that’s actually popular.
Frankly, renting computing power is probably a better business to be in for the time being—though it likely won’t be fun to be left with all that server space if and when the bubble pops. But hey, that’s a problem for a different quarter, no time to worry about the future when you’re trying to figure out how to generate shareholder value now.
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