Meta shares jump 10% after reports company is selling excess AI computing power

Meta shares jumped nearly 10% Wednesday following a report the company is planning to sell excess computing power, allowing it to recover some of the billions of dollars it has sunk into AI.The Menlo Park, Calif.-based tech giant, which has rushed to secure pricey data centers and chips, is building a new cloud business to sell access to its AI models and compute, according to Bloomberg.It’s welcome news for investors, who have grown anxious over whether Meta will be able to deliver returns on the hundreds of billions of dollars it has spent to build up a trove of coveted computing power, with a goal of developing “superintelligence.”Meta declined to comment.The new cloud business would allow Meta to generate revenue on any leftover capacity, while setting it up to compete with industry leaders like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, CoreWeave and SpaceX.Meta is debating whether the cloud business should be structured to sell access to its own AI models, or to raw computing power itself, according to the report, which noted that plans could change.If it decides to sell access to AI models on its own infrastructure, it would be taking a similar approach to Amazon – running the data centers and chips that power the bots and then charging customers fees to access them.Elon Musk’s SpaceX – which took over his artificial intelligence firm xAI in February – has adopted a similar approach, striking lucrative rental deals with Anthropic and Google for access to its huge Memphis data center.Anthropic agreed to pay $1.25 billion a month, while Google signed off on a $920 million monthly fee.Meta could alternatively choose to sell access to its computing capacity, similar to CoreWeave’s business model.OpenAI kicked off the race to amass large amounts of computing capacity in 2022 with the launch of its ChatGPT bot, as developers recognized that there was a limited amount of power despite skyrocketing demand.In April, shares in Meta slid after the company raised its spe...