Zuckerberg Wants to Sell Spare AI Computing Power, But Admits Meta Doesn't Know How Yet
Meta is sitting on enormous computing capacity and getting premium offers to lease it out. Zuckerberg says he's tempted, but selling too much now could kneecap the company's own AI plans.
Key points
- Meta raised its 2026 capital expenditure, meaning planned spending on data centres and chips, to between $130 billion and $145 billion, a $5 billion increase at the low end.
- Mark Zuckerberg said on Meta's second-quarter 2025 earnings call that the company is receiving offers to lease spare computing power at prices above what Meta paid for it.
- AI startup Anthropic is in preliminary talks to rent computing capacity from Meta, as first reported by CNBC Tech.
- Meta's free cash flow, the money left after spending, fell 90% from a year earlier as data centre costs soared.
- Advertising still makes up 98% of Meta's total revenue, which is why the company is searching for a second business.
Meta has quietly become one of the biggest buyers of AI computing power on the planet. The company is spending between $130 billion and $145 billion this year alone on data centres and the specialised chips that run artificial intelligence. The problem: it does not yet have a business that sells any of that power to others.
Every other major US tech giant does. Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud all rent out computing capacity to businesses that do not want to build their own infrastructure. Meta, despite spending at similar scale, has no such product.
Could Meta really sell computing power to other companies?
Zuckerberg says yes, but he is being careful. He confirmed on Wednesday's earnings call that Meta is fielding offers from outside companies willing to pay a significant premium above what Meta paid for its own capacity. Anthropic, the AI safety company behind the Claude family of chatbots, is reportedly in early talks to lease some of that power.
Still, Zuckerberg is not ready to simply auction off spare capacity to the highest bidder.
"It would be foolish to basically just sell all of the compute and take a short-term profit," he told investors.
His reasoning is straightforward. Meta needs that processing power for its own AI models, including Muse Spark 1.1, a model its chief AI officer Alexandr Wang describes as Meta's strongest yet for coding and automated tasks. Selling too much too soon could leave Meta unable to run its own systems at full speed.
What would a Meta cloud business actually look like?
Beyond raw capacity, Zuckerberg sketched a broader picture. He said a Meta enterprise offering could include API access (a way for outside software to connect directly to Meta's AI tools), productivity services, and AI agents (software that can carry out multi-step tasks on its own, like researching a topic or drafting documents).
"I think there's just a very, very large opportunity there," he said, without giving a launch date or specific product details.
He also acknowledged the obvious gap: Meta has never successfully sold to businesses. Building an enterprise sales team, the kind that calls on companies large and small, is not something Meta has done before. Dave Brown, a former senior executive at Amazon Web Services, is joining Meta, a hire that suggests Zuckerberg is serious about filling that gap.
"That's going to be somewhat a new muscle that we build as a company," Zuckerberg said.
Should investors and users be worried?
Investors reacted badly. Meta shares fell more than 7% in after-hours trading after the company posted a weaker-than-expected revenue forecast and confirmed free cash flow dropped 90% year on year.
For ordinary users, the more immediate question is what Meta does with all this AI capacity. The company's own products, including Meta AI built into WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook, depend on it. If Meta leans too hard into renting capacity out, its own consumer tools could slow down or improve less quickly.
Zuckerberg's track record adds legitimate caution. His last major bet beyond advertising was the metaverse, a virtual-reality digital world he pushed hard from 2021. That division, Reality Labs, lost $4.62 billion in the most recent quarter on just $431 million of revenue. The lesson Wall Street keeps drawing is that Meta is very good at advertising and less certain about everything else.
The AI computing bet is bigger in scale than the metaverse was. Whether building an enterprise cloud business counts as learning from that lesson, or repeating it at greater cost, is the question Zuckerberg has not yet answered.
Common questions
What does "computing capacity" mean in this context?
It means the physical servers, storage systems and specialised AI chips inside Meta's data centres. When companies talk about leasing or selling capacity, they mean letting outside organisations run their software on that hardware, usually for a fee charged by the hour or by volume of work processed.
Does this affect how Meta handles my personal data?
Not directly. The capacity being discussed is computing power for AI workloads, not user data storage. Meta's data policies would remain separate from any commercial cloud arrangement it strikes with other companies.
Why does 98% advertising revenue matter?
It means almost every dollar Meta earns comes from one source: selling ad space on Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. If ad spending by businesses drops, or if regulators restrict targeted advertising, Meta has almost nothing else to fall back on. A cloud computing business would give it a second revenue stream.
