According to Bloomberg, Meta is planning a new cloud infrastructure operation to sell AI computing and modelling services. After a sustained investment in the data centre, the company is trying to transform part of the infrastructure into a more direct source of income.
To compete with cloud manufacturers
If the plan landes, Meta will compete directly with Amazon AWS, Google Clouds and Microsoft Azure. It was mentioned that Meta was not only considering the sale of “primitive” algorithms but was also assessing the possibility of hosting model services.
Possible products to be included include the recently launched closed-source model of Meta. The related business is said to be subsumed under a new project called Meta Company.
$18.29 billion invested to be realized
Meta has continued to expand AI infrastructure spending in recent years. By the end of the first quarter of this year, it was reported that Meta had committed $18.29 billion over the next few years for AI infrastructure, including a large data centre project in Louisiana and Ohio.
The Ohio project is expected to go online this year. Zuckerberg had previously stated that the project would be “Manhattan size”. In this context, Meta began to seek faster realization paths.
The industry started selling excess.
This movement also shows that competition in the AI industry is extending from modelling capacity to data centres and computing resources. A few weeks ago SpaceX also launched a similar arrangement through XAI.
According to the report, in early May this year, Anthropic signed an agreement with SpaceX to cover the full computing capacity of the Data Centre Colossus 1 under SpaceX. Since then SpaceX has signed similar lease agreements with Google and Reflecting AI.
Compared to Google and OpenAI, the external demand for Meta owns AI models and services is unclear. Meta did not disclose separately the revenues of Meta AI or Llama in the financial statements, and management ' s public statements placed more emphasis on the internal use of AI.
This means that Meta ' s AI operations may not yet have developed sufficiently clear independent revenue lines. External sales algorithms and model hosting services have become new ways of improving infrastructure utilization and recycling inputs.
Additional information:According to Bloomberg, the project was led by the Head of Meta Infrastructure, Santos Janardhan, the Head of Meta Superintelligence Labs, Daniel Gross, and the Managing Director, Dina Powell McCormick. In May this year, Zuckerberg also stated that Meta's development of cloud computing operations “must be within consideration”.