【AI Computing Power】 Meta, the largest buyer, suddenly changes course—reportedly to sell the remaining “computing power.” Micron rapidly stabs in and triggers a major shockwave across the AI industry chain.

Meta (US: META) has reportedly made a major strategic shift that has shaken the AI industry chain. According to Bloomberg, Meta, the largest buyer of computing power, has shifted to selling computing power, generating revenue by selling surplus computing capacity to external customers.

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

The report indicates that Meta is formulating a plan for a cloud infrastructure business that will sell access to AI computing power and models. This will put it in direct competition with industry leaders such as Amazon's AWS, Microsoft's Azure, and Google Cloud, and even SpaceX, which is aggressively developing orbital computing power, saw its shares decline.

People familiar with the matter said one potential plan includes selling access to various AI models hosted on Meta's existing AI infrastructure, an approach similar to AWS's Bedrock service. Meta would operate the data centers and chips that drive these models (including its own Muse Spark model) and charge developers for access.

The company is also considering selling access to "raw" computing power, similar to so-called "neocloud" companies like CoreWeave.

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

The cloud business provides a path to recoup some of the investment. AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud have 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 surplus computing infrastructure. He said during the May earnings call, "Almost every week, different external companies approach us, either hoping we build an API service or asking if we have computing power to sell them, with offers even at a premium over our procurement cost."

"We haven't done that yet because we think we still have uses for that computing power," Zuckerberg said at the time. "But obviously, if we reach a point where we feel we have overbuilt, that's an option we have, and it's part of the reason we feel confident in investing to expand infrastructure."