Meta is emerging as a major Microsoft AI customer while simultaneously pushing its own open-weight models and AI services to reduce reliance on external providers and compete in the rapidly evolving AI market.

Meta Platforms has now emerged as one of Microsoft’s biggest AI customers. According to Bloomberg, the social media company is spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year to use artificial intelligence models through Microsoft’s Azure cloud service. Meta has reportedly used trillions of tokens through the platform.

Microsoft’s AI strategy stands apart from those of other tech giants because of its ability to offer models from a variety of providers through a marketplace called Foundry, which had 100,000 customers as of July. With this approach, Microsoft has been able to attract several major technology companies as customers, including ByteDance, Adobe, AI firms Perplexity and Sierra, among others.

However, the potential downsides of revenue concentration and circular business dealings have been a concern in the tech industry for years. For AI to live up to its hype, the technology will need to be adopted across the broader economy rather than primarily by sophisticated technology companies.

OpenAI accounted for 70% of Microsoft’s overall AI revenue in its most recent fiscal year. Meta, meanwhile, has been spending heavily to support its software development efforts, buying access to models through multiple platforms based on their availability and cost, according to people familiar with the matter.

techMore from TechMeta’s Own AI Ventures

Meta is also planning to sell access to various AI models through an API service that could compete with Microsoft Foundry. This could help Meta reduce its reliance on external services, including those provided by Microsoft.

Apart from becoming one of Microsoft’s biggest AI customers, Meta recently announced plans to introduce a range of new AI models designed to run directly on laptops and personal devices.

Unlike OpenAI and Anthropic, Meta has made some of its models available as open-weight systems, allowing developers to download, modify and run them independently rather than accessing them exclusively through Meta’s services.

Zuckerberg’s Stance on Open-Weight Models

Chinese companies such as Alibaba, DeepSeek and Moonshot have also released open-weight AI models that developers can download, customise and run themselves. Zuckerberg argues that this approach could give these companies an advantage, particularly as US AI developers face greater restrictions in areas such as the use of training data.

With this strategy, Meta is betting that openness could become an advantage in the increasingly competitive AI market.