Meta’s Zuckerberg Says Exploring AI Cloud Business Makes Sense

Meta Platforms Inc. needs all the computing power it can get, Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg said, but in a market starved for resources necessary to run and develop artificial intelligence products he’s also considering whether some of Meta’s AI infrastructure could be more valuable if rented to outsiders.

“The offers that you get for using the compute are so high that it may make sense, in some cases, to rent out or consider those kind of deals instead of your own internal uses,” Zuckerberg said in an exclusive interview with Bloomberg.

Meta is developing plans for a cloud business, Bloomberg reported earlier this month — a chance to drive direct revenue from the company’s suite of data centers and other computing power partnerships. Zuckerberg said the potential for a cloud business is “certainly there any time we want to build it.”

That doesn’t mean Meta has already overbuilt, or has excess computing power available, Zuckerberg said.

“I don’t know anyone in the industry who feels like they have too much compute,” he said. Meta is currently using all the computing power in its arsenal, he added.

Read More: Zuckerberg Sets ‘Aggressive’ Price With Meta’s Pay-to-Use AI

Meta’s stock has climbed since Bloomberg’s report last week that it is considering multiple kinds of cloud businesses. One option under consideration includes selling access to various AI models hosted on Meta’s existing AI infrastructure, akin to AWS’s Bedrock offering. Meta would run the data centers and chips that power the models, including its own Muse Spark models, and charge developers to access them.

Zuckerberg didn’t confirm that Meta was exploring selling access to competitors’ models hosted on its own servers, but said, “I think that’s certainly a thing that we could do and that I think would make sense to consider.”

The company is also developing plans to sell access to “raw” computing capacity, akin to other so-called neocloud businesses like CoreWeave Inc., Bloomberg reported.

“I think as a backstop, even if for whatever reason we don’t need all the compute ourselves or for any number of reasons, there’s a very large amount of demand that I think you could sell it long-term like AWS or Azure or Google Compute,” Zuckerberg said in the interview.

Read More: Meta Is Planning a Cloud Business to Sell AI Computing Power

Zuckerberg said he is interested in the recent approach taken by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which is renting access to its massive data center in Memphis to Anthropic PBC and also struck a deal with Google. That strategy could help SpaceXAI generate more than $50 billion in revenue by 2028 and $100 billion by 2030, according to an estimate from Bloomberg Intelligence.

“The SpaceX model I think is quite interesting in terms of just making these short-term deals that are at a big premium,” Zuckerberg said. “So we get offers for all kinds of stuff like this and we’ll evaluate them and see what makes sense.”

Meta announced Thursday that it plans to sell access to its new model, Muse Spark 1.1, via an API, which is yet another type of cloud offering. In that instance, Meta will run the model on its AI infrastructure and charge developers based on how much data they use while accessing it, which is measured in tokens.

Still, Zuckerberg said, “right now we feel like we have a lot of internal uses for the compute as well.”