Meta follows SpaceX’s playbook and builds a cloud business to sell its spare AI compute to outside customers

Meta pulls a SpaceX, building its own cloud business to sell spare AI compute to outside customers instead of using all that massively purchased computing power on its own models, Bloomberg reports. The company may also offer access to AI models on its infrastructure. The stock jumped about 10 percent on the news. The playbook comes from SpaceX, which rents out GPU capacity originally bought for Musk’s xAI to train superintelligent models, with deals worth $1.25 billion per month with Anthropic and $920 million per month with Google.

Meta is one of the biggest buyers of Nvidia GPUs and has laid off large numbers of employees, reportedly to fund up to $145 billion in AI infrastructure spending this year alone. Reselling spare compute makes financial sense. But if Meta has capacity left over, the original reason for buying all that hardware, building better in-house models, apparently isn’t a big enough draw. Muse Spark, Meta’s first model under Alexandr Wang, poached from Scale AI, was positioned in April as “the first product of a ground-up overhaul of our AI efforts.”

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