Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg says the company is carefully weighing whether to sell excess AI computing capacity or keep it to support its own long-term AI ambitions as it continues investing heavily in data center infrastructure.
Meta is the only major U.S. hyperscaler that does not offer cloud infrastructure and services, despite spending on capital projects at levels similar to its competitors. In recent months, Zuckerberg has suggested the company could launch a cloud business to make use of its growing AI computing capacity.
Reports have also indicated that Anthropic is in preliminary talks to lease computing power from Meta. During the company’s second-quarter earnings call, Zuckerberg said, “We’re getting a lot of offers for compute at a significant premium over what we paid for it. And we have more coding and productivity tools on our roadmap as well.”
Meta recently issued a weaker-than-expected revenue forecast for the third quarter and reported that free cash flow fell 90% compared to a year earlier because of rising capital expenditure. The company also increased the lower end of its 2026 capital expenditure guidance by $5 billion, bringing the projected range to $130 billion-$145 billion.
Zuckerberg said Meta is evaluating opportunities beyond simply renting computing power. The company is also developing APIs, productivity tools, and AI agents that could become part of a future enterprise business.
At the same time, he stressed that Meta needs significant computing capacity to support its own AI roadmap, including new models being developed under AI chief Alexandr Wang. Earlier this month, Meta introduced the Muse Spark 1.1 model, which Wang described as “the strongest model for agentic and coding work yet” at a lower cost than competing offerings.
“It would be foolish to basically just sell all of the compute and take a short-term profit,” Zuckerberg said.
He acknowledged that expanding into enterprise services would require Meta to develop new capabilities. “That’s going to be somewhat a new muscle that we build as a company. But I think it’s a very important one that we build,” he said.
Despite continued losses from its Reality Labs business, Zuckerberg remains confident that Meta’s AI investments will pay off. “I get that this is sort of a big bet across the industry. My personal bet is that the people who invest in this are going to be rewarded and feel very good over time.”
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