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 itโs 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 thatโs 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 โvarious AI models that are hosted on Metaโs existing AI infrastructureโ, 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 heโs open to selling excess computing infrastructure, or an API service where users pay for AI usage. In other words, Meta would be selling the โtokensโ 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.
โWe havenโt done that yet because we think we have a use for the computeโ, Zuckerberg said. โBut 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 outโ. 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)