Meta has fielded offers to rent out its AI infrastructure at “a meaningful premium over what we paid for the compute,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg told analysts on the second-quarter earnings call. Meta has no cloud business today, and Zuckerberg said training its own models still consumes a “substantial” share of the capacity. The remark followed a quarter in which free cash flow fell 91% to $784 million from $8.55 billion, Meta’s weakest since the third quarter of 2022, against $31.1 billion in quarterly capital spending. Meta also lifted the floor of its annual capex range to $130 billion from $125 billion, leaving the ceiling at $145 billion. Its three rivals all reported cloud growth that helps absorb that spending, with Google Cloud up 82% to $24.8 billion, Azure up 43%, and AWS up 37%.
