Meta, the parent company of Facebook, has begun reviewing a plan to sell to outside parties the surplus resources from the computing infrastructure it built to develop artificial superintelligence (ASI). If Meta enters the cloud business on this basis, a shake-up is expected in a market divided among Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. Meta's decision has also raised oversupply concerns for AI infrastructure-related companies, including memory chipmakers.
Bloomberg reported Monday that Meta has internally launched a "Meta Compute" plan and is designing a cloud business model utilizing its data center infrastructure. According to sources, Meta is pursuing the cloud business through two main approaches. First, it would place its latest in-house AI model, "Muse Spark," on its own infrastructure and allow external developers to use it through an application programming interface (API). This is a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) similar to AWS's "Bedrock," Microsoft Azure's "AI Foundry," and Google Cloud's "Vertex AI." The other method is to lease out the pure computing power itself—the raw material of a data center—wholesale to outside parties. This resembles the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) model used mainly by companies such as CoreWeave and Nebius.
Meta is preparing this business because it is pouring enormous funds into building AI data centers while its immediate revenue model is limited. Meta has recently unveiled its ASI development plan and is aggressively building data center infrastructure, stockpiling AI chips including expensive Nvidia graphics processing units (GPUs). Meta's capital expenditure (CAPEX) announced for this year alone reaches up to $145 billion (about 225 trillion won). Yet Meta is the only one among the four major hyperscalers—along with Amazon, Microsoft, and Google—that does not provide cloud services. This is why the AI overinvestment debate has flared up around Meta in particular in the market.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg, when asked about the possibility of entering the cloud market at the shareholders' meeting last May, answered that it was "a very possible option." "Almost every week, outside companies ask us to provide API services or whether there is computing capacity they can buy, even at a premium over the price we paid," he said. "When we reach a point where we judge it to be an overbuilt state, that approach will become an option."
On news of the entry into the cloud market, Meta's shares surged 8.81% on the New York Stock Exchange that day. In contrast, as the news was interpreted as a signal of oversupply of AI computing resources, semiconductor-related stocks fell across the board, including Nvidia (-1.25%), Broadcom (-2.23%), Micron (-10.57%), AMD (-6.89%), Intel (-9.03%), Applied Materials (-9.97%), Lam Research (-9.71%), and SanDisk (-10.62%). The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index also plunged 6.27%, while "neocloud" companies CoreWeave and Nebius, which run cloud businesses similar to the service Meta is envisioning, fell 13.92% and 17.01%, respectively.
