Meta shares jumped nearly 10% on July 1, 2026, following a report that the company is building a new cloud business to sell excess AI computing power, allowing it to recover some of the billions of dollars it has invested in artificial intelligence infrastructure. The Menlo Park-based tech giant has rushed to secure pricey data centers and chips, and the new venture would generate revenue on any leftover capacity.
According to Bloomberg, Meta is debating whether the cloud business should sell access to its own AI models or to raw computing power itself. If it decides to sell access to AI models on its own infrastructure, it would take a similar approach to Amazon, running the data centers and charging customers fees to access them. Alternatively, it could sell access to computing capacity, similar to CoreWeave’s business model.
The news is welcome for investors who have grown anxious over whether Meta will deliver returns on the hundreds of billions of dollars spent building computing capacity. In April, shares in Meta slid after the company raised its spending forecast to $145 billion amid fears that AI stocks are overvalued, similar to the dot-com bubble of the early 2000s, as reported by the New York Post.
For New York’s investor community and Wall Street analysts, the move represents a potentially significant shift in the AI infrastructure landscape. Meta would be competing with industry leaders like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, CoreWeave and SpaceX in the cloud computing space. Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which took over his AI firm xAI in February, has already struck lucrative rental deals with Anthropic at $1.25 billion per month and Google at $920 million monthly for access to its Memphis data center.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg signaled openness to selling excess power at the annual shareholder meeting in May. ‘Almost every week there are different companies that come to us from the outside asking us to both stand up an API service or asking if we have compute that they could buy from us at some premium to what we’ve bought it at,’ Zuckerberg said, as quoted by the New York Post.
The development comes at a critical moment for AI stocks, which have experienced significant volatility. Microsoft shares fell 19% in June for the stock’s worst month since the dot-com crash, and concerns about AI spending have fueled layoffs across the tech sector. The Dow, S&P 500 and Nasdaq all wrapped up their strongest quarter in years on June 30, but analysts warn that more volatility could be in store, according to the New York Post.
Meta paid $15 billion last summer to hire AI executive Alexandr Wang and take a 49% stake in his startup Scale AI. The company released its first AI model under Wang’s lead in April, though the model did not live up to hopes for a state-of-the-art bot. Wang defended the model, saying it should serve as an ‘appetizer’ while Meta is ‘cooking’ up the main course.
The 10% share jump reflects the market’s appetite for concrete monetization strategies in AI. For New York-based investors and fund managers, Meta’s cloud computing venture could provide a new benchmark for evaluating the revenue potential of AI infrastructure investments across the technology sector.
