Mark Zuckerberg has spent the better part of the last two years convincing Wall Street that pouring tens of billions into AI infrastructure would eventually pay off. Now he’s pitching the receipts, or at least the plan for generating them: a dedicated AI cloud business that would sell Meta’s excess computing power to outside companies.
The company’s AI capital expenditure guidance for 2026 sits between $125 billion and $145 billion. And if you’re spending that kind of money on compute, you’d better find more than one way to use it.
From social network to cloud contender
Zuckerberg first floated the idea publicly at Meta’s shareholder meeting on May 27, saying that entering the cloud market was “definitely on the table.” By July 9, the language had firmed up considerably, with the CEO confirming that the company was actively exploring an AI cloud business and arguing that selling excess computing power simply “makes sense.”
The company is reportedly in early discussions for a potential two-year, $10 billion deal to lease computing capacity to Anthropic, the AI safety startup behind the Claude family of models. If that deal materializes, it would represent one of the largest single cloud computing agreements in the industry and serve as a major proof of concept for Meta’s cloud ambitions.
