Meta sells 'excess compute' it doesn't have

Meta's shares rose as much as 9% in trading on Wednesday, on the strength of a business the company has not built, will not confirm, and by the evidence of its own recent spending cannot yet staff with idle machines. Bloomberg reported that morning that Meta Platforms is developing a cloud business, part of an internal initiative called Meta Compute, to sell outside customers access to its data centers and models: a hosted-model service modeled on Amazon's Bedrock, alongside "raw" capacity of the sort neoclouds such as CoreWeave rent out by the gigawatt. The effort is run by Santosh Janardhan, Meta's head of infrastructure, together with Daniel Gross, a senior figure inside Meta Superintelligence Labs, and Dina Powell McCormick, the company's president. It reads, at first, as Meta joining Amazon, Microsoft and Google in the business of renting out the chips it has spent a fortune acquiring.