Meta has done a lot of things beyond its own social media space. Examples include things like smart glasses and its own AI chatbot. Now, the company is leaning into the latter, with reports indicating that it’s planning to enter the cloud infrastructure business. This will allow it to not only sell access to AI computing power, but also models.
Bloomberg reports that the company has been rushing to secure data centres and other infrastructure for its own AI ambitions. This is part of an internal initiative that’s known as Meta Compute. But now, the company plans to make use of that to generate revenue by selling excess compute power to others. Alternatively, or even in addition to that, the company plans to sell access to “various AI models that are hosted on Meta’s existing AI infrastructure”, including its own Muse Spark models. This is noted to be similar to AWS Bedrock.
The report cites company CEO Mark Zuckerberg as telling investors back in May that he’s open to selling excess computing infrastructure, or an API service where users pay for AI usage. In other words, Meta would be selling the “tokens” in the generative AI process. He also claims that he has been approached by other businesses, asking Meta to sell either tokens or just raw computing power.
“We haven’t done that yet because we think we have a use for the compute”, Zuckerberg said. “But obviously if we get to a point where we feel that we have overbuilt, then that is an option that we have, and that is partially what gives us confidence in investing in building this out”. The report also cites Zuckerberg as having repeatedly said that he thinks Meta should amass as much computing capacity as possible, and determine a use for it later.
(Source: Bloomberg)