[AI Computing Power] Largest Buyer Meta Makes a U-Turn, Reportedly Selling Remaining "Computing Power"; Micron Plunges, Shocking AI Industry Chain

Meta (US: META) has reportedly made a major strategic change, sending shockwaves through the AI industry chain. According to Bloomberg, Meta, the largest buyer of computing power, has shifted to selling computing power—creating revenue by selling excess computing capacity to external customers.

CoreWeave (US: CRWV) fell 12%, Nebius (US: NBIS) dropped 13%, Micron (US: MU) declined 6%, and Meta (US: META) surged 9%.

The report said Meta is working on a cloud infrastructure business plan to sell access to AI computing power and model access rights. This will set off a new round of competition with industry leaders such as Amazon’s AWS, Microsoft’s Azure, and Google Cloud, and even SpaceX, which is keen on developing in-orbit computing power, also fell.

Insiders said one potential plan includes selling access rights to various AI models that are hosted on Meta’s existing AI infrastructure. This approach is similar to AWS’s Bedrock service. Meta will operate the data centers and chips that run these models (including its own Muse Spark model) and charge developers access fees.

The company is also considering selling access rights to “raw” computing power, similar to so-called “neocloud” companies such as CoreWeave.

Meta, which has listed developing AI “superintelligence” as a top priority, has invested hundreds of billions of dollars into data centers and other AI infrastructure (such as the expensive chips it believes are necessary to achieve that goal). This massive investment has left investors anxious about how Meta will generate returns from these expenditures, including major computing power deals it has reached with companies such as CoreWeave, Google, and Oracle.

The cloud business offers a way to recoup some of the investment. AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud spent decades building platforms that rent out access to computing power, storage, and software over the internet—businesses that now generate tens of billions of dollars in revenue each quarter.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has signaled to investors that he is open to selling excess computing infrastructure. In the May earnings call, he said, “Almost every week, different external companies come to us—either hoping we build an API service, or asking whether we have computing power we can sell them. Their bids are even a bit higher than our procurement price, with a premium.”

“We aren’t doing that right now, because we think we still have uses for this computing power,” Zuckerberg said at the time. “But obviously, if we get to a point where we feel we’ve built too much, then that is an option we have—and it’s also part of the reason we feel confident investing in expanding our infrastructure.”