Meta's plan to sell excess AI computing power sent its own stock soaring Wednesday but crushed the shares of chip makers and cloud infrastructure providers, exposing a fault line in the AI investment thesis. The company is building a cloud infrastructure business that would lease surplus AI computing power and offer access to hosted AI models, Bloomberg reported. CNBC's Jim Cramer confirmed Meta would sell excess capacity to outside customers.
Meta shares jumped 10% on the news, climbing to $613.65 in morning trading. The pop signals investor relief that Meta's eye-watering capital spending could generate returns. The company told investors in April it plans to spend as much as $145 billion on capex this year, a $10 billion increase from prior guidance, driven by data center expansion and GPU procurement.
But the opposite played out for the companies that built their businesses around selling compute to AI developers. Shares of neocloud operators CoreWeave and Nebius Group both plunged about 12% each, according to CNBC.
Chip and AI infrastructure stocks also fell broadly, with the Seeking Alpha report flagging declines across the sector. The divergence captures a fundamental shift. Meta has spent years as one of the world's biggest buyers of AI chips and data center capacity, competing with Amazon, Microsoft, and Google for finite GPU supply.
If it becomes a seller of that same compute, it shifts from driving demand to competing with the very cloud providers it helped create demand for.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg had hinted at the possibility. During Meta's shareholder meeting in May, he said companies frequently approached Meta asking to buy compute capacity at a premium, according to Yahoo Finance.
"We haven't done that yet, because we think that we have a use for the compute," Zuckerberg said. "But obviously if we get to a point where we feel that we have overbuilt, then that is an option that we have."
Meta is still debating whether to offer access to AI models hosted on its infrastructure or sell raw computing power, per Bloomberg. The new business would throw Meta into direct competition with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and CoreWeave.
The move could help diversify Meta's revenue away from its reliance on advertising. The stock is still down more than 23% over the past 12 months and 14% year to date, as investors have grown wary of the company's AI spending without clear monetization.
First-quarter 2026 revenue surged 33% year-over-year to $56.3 billion, CFO Susan Li said, with the capex hike to $125-$145 billion reflecting expectations for higher component pricing and additional data center costs.
