Zuck Says Meta Will Sell Its Excess Compute, Maybe – Moby THE GIST
Our analysts just identified a stock with the potential to be the next Nvidia. Tell us how you invest and we’ll show you why it’s our #1 pick. Tap here.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has a history of burning billions on trendy ideas.
You might remember the Metaverse. Well, Zuck’s at it again. This week, he told Meta shareholders at the annual meeting that he wants to enter the cloud computing market, if the company has extra capacity to sell.
WHAT HAPPENED
On April 29, Meta raised its 2026 capex guidance from $125 billion to $145 billion to build out its AI infrastructure, which is approximately the GDP of Bulgaria. To put that into perspective, Meta spent only $72 billion last year.
The company’s CFO, Susan Li said during the first-quarter earnings call the uptick is due to high “component pricing,” and data center costs. And even the $145 billion might be an estimate, as DRAM prices are forecasted to rise at least 125%.
Like all the other CEOs pouring billions into AI infrastructure, Zuck wasn’t definitive about how or when all this spend will turn into profit. When an analyst asked him to provide concrete signs of short-term ROI on all the spending, or what specific milestones the executive team is looking at, Zuckerberg deflected saying it was “a very technical question,” Benzinga reports.
WHY IT MATTERS
Mark’s response is reminiscent of what he said in 2021 and 2022 after analysts rightly panicked over Reality Labs bleeding $10-plus billion annually with no revenue.
One stock. Nvidia-level potential. 30M+ investors trust Moby to find it first. Get the pick. Tap here.
The response, for those that remember, is reminiscent of what he said in 2022 after analysts panicked over Reality Labs bleeding more than $10 billion annually with no discernible revenue.
Reality Labs would go on to bleed another $70 to $90 billion, and no one, at least that we know, is vibing currently in the Metaverse as Zuck once hoped.
Analysts and investors worry that Zuckerberg is chasing yet another sunk-cost fallacy. If Meta does have excess capacity, and plans to sell the compute, the company will immediately be in competition with Amazon and Microsoft.
But only Amazon is actually turning a profit on its hyperscale AI investment. Some outside analysis, as reported by the Financial Times, shows that Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta, and Oracle would earn negative return on their AI investment. And this is with the models assumed to have zero operating costs.
According to the model cited by the FT, only Amazon’s AI buildout would be capable of generating a modest positive return of 7.2%. Meta’s came in at…. -29%.