Meta Stock Jumped Over 9 Percent After A Report Said The Company Is Building A Cloud Computing Business

Meta Platforms stock rose more than 9 percent on Wednesday after Bloomberg reported the company is building a new cloud computing business that would sell excess computing capacity to outside customers, entering the same market as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and CoreWeave, and potentially generating significant new revenue to offset Meta's massive AI spending.

The plan calls for Meta to create a new business segment that would let third-party developers and companies pay to access Meta's data center infrastructure.

Two specific models are being discussed: hosting AI models in Meta's facilities and charging developers to run them, and selling raw hardware access the way CoreWeave does, renting GPU time to customers who need compute for their own AI workloads.

Both would monetize infrastructure Meta has already built and is paying for regardless.

Mark Zuckerberg had been telegraphing this direction for months. At Meta's shareholders meeting in May he described receiving weekly inquiries from outside companies asking to either access a Meta API service or buy computing capacity directly.

"We haven't done that yet, because we think that we have a use for the compute," he said, "but obviously if we get to a point where we feel that we have overbuilt, then that is an option that we have."

The Bloomberg report suggests that point has arrived, or that Meta is preparing for it. Meta stock had been down more than 23 percent over the prior 12 months amid investor concern over the pace of AI infrastructure spending.

A new revenue line that monetizes that spending directly is exactly the catalyst investors had been waiting for.