Meta Is Building a Cloud Business to Sell Excess AI Compute

Meta is simultaneously so short on capacity that they're renting from Google and also have so much excess capacity that they're going to sell it.

>One potential plan includes selling access to various AI models that are hosted on Meta’s existing AI infrastructure, an approach similar to AWS’s Bedrock offering, the people said. Meta would run the data centers and chips that power the models, including its own Muse Spark models, and charge developers to access them.

>The company is also considering selling access to “raw” computing capacity, akin to other so-called neocloud businesses like CoreWeave Inc., the people said. Development of these new business lines is part of Meta Compute, an internal initiative to build and manage the company’s AI infrastructure efforts, according to a person familiar with the plans. Meta Compute is led by Santosh Janardhan, Meta’s head of infrastructure; Daniel Gross, a leader inside the Meta Superintelligence Labs AI unit; and Meta President Dina Powell McCormick.

They have the concepts of a plan.... they will either sell tokens, sell GPU hours, or maybe just sell web hosting (like a Facebook page)

Did we go from a supply crisis to oversupply already? xAI(SpaceX) and Meta are already renting out compute, which means the hard fought and won GPUs/DCs/electricity can't be productively used by them and its better to find some other revenue stream.

Amazon, Google, Microsoft who may have withered AI crash (because they sell shovels) already have competition, how long before we see a lot more companies renting/selling their AI DCs?

i wonder if we should expect this to fail by default.

The meta culture has historically been known as "move fast and break things". This seems counter to a typical cloud business.

Seeing how meta works in ads and business interfaces for whatsapp/instagram, it seems that

1. meta lacks support and customer success functions for enterprise

2. meta lacks b2b sales functions/culture

3. meta lacks a scrutable high quality operations culture for their APIs (SLAs, scaling, etc).

These aren't easy things to gain, and we see the problems that the AI providers/azure/gcp etc have had historically as consequence of these various issues.

> Zuck finally takes the L

https://x.com/zephyr_z9/status/2072298455314436380

Seems a bit of a no brainer. Other models take off, you win because you're selling hardware space...your models take off, you've got at cost hosting.

Meta has no strategy. And is chasing anything to get something to show investors. But I’d like to see how their design and UX improves over current neo cloud

Another one bites the dust?

After SpaceX (xAI), now Meta can't find better ways to make revenue than selling raw inference...

Hardware makers win.

Meta also tried building a mobile alternative to google/apple.

So short meta?

Surprised they didn't do it a long time ago.

I hate the company, but I suspect their cloud provider would be a lot easier to use than the existing ones, and would be willing to use it at work.