You know the old adage: Those who can, do; those who can’t, rent their space to those who can. According to a report from Bloomberg, Meta is considering getting into the cloud computing business, renting out its infrastructure to other companies that want access to computing power for their AI operations, as the company continues to struggle to get its own model to compete with the frontier labs. Per Bloomberg, Meta is exploring two primary potential arrangements for its prospective new business, which is apparently being called Meta Compute inside the company. One option would be to sell access to AI models hosted on Meta’s own data center infrastructure. The other would be to sell “raw” compute capacity that other companies could then run their own models on. Gizmodo reached out to Meta for comment on its reported new business venture but did not receive a response at the time of publication.
The move to potentially open up its infrastructure to others comes as Meta has struggled to get its own AI models off the ground. The company has repeatedly reorganized its AI division, thrown massive multi-million-dollar bags at researchers and experts, and laid off hundreds of people in an attempt to consolidate its focus on building AI models that could compete with the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic. None of it has been particularly successful.
