Meta shares surged more than 10% in New York trading after Bloomberg reported the company is developing a cloud infrastructure business that would sell access to its AI computing power and models to third parties. The move, viewed from Wall Street as a potential answer to investor anxiety over the scale of Meta’s capital spending, immediately reshuffled the competitive landscape: shares of specialist AI cloud providers CoreWeave and Nebius fell 14% and 17% respectively on the prospect of a deep-pocketed new entrant.

The logic of the pivot is rooted in the sheer volume of infrastructure Meta is already building for its own AI ambitions. The company has committed between $125bn and $145bn in total investments this year, including a $10bn data centre in Mississippi and proprietary chip development with Broadcom. Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg told shareholders in May that outside firms ask “practically every week” to buy compute capacity at above cost, and that selling excess would be an option once supply outstripped internal demand. The model under consideration ranges from bare compute rental to a full platform akin to Amazon Web Services, a strategy already tested by SpaceX, which has leased data-centre capacity to Anthropic and Google.

Behind the market enthusiasm, however, a different picture emerges from inside the company. French daily Le Devoir reports that Meta’s AI sprint has triggered layoffs of roughly 8,000 staff, the reassignment of 6,500 employees to AI teams, and a suspended programme that captured workers’ keystrokes and clicks to train AI agents—prompting a petition signed by more than 1,600 staff. The departure of Yann LeCun, Meta’s long-time AI research chief, after he was subordinated to 29-year-old Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang, has been read in Paris as a sign of a research culture under strain. LeCun told the Financial Times that Wang had “no research experience” and that the pursuit of superintelligence via large language models was a “dead end”.

The broader financing of the AI buildout is reshaping markets in ways that extend beyond tech stocks. US analysts note that combined debt at Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet and Meta rose 60% over the past year to $533bn, yet corporate bond spreads remain stable, suggesting no crowding-out of other borrowers so far. Wellington Management’s Brij Khurana argues the effects are surfacing instead in equity markets, where bank stocks have outperformed the S&P 500 this year, lifted by underwriting fees and interest income from AI-related debt issuance. The next milestone for Meta will be any formal announcement of the cloud service, with investors likely to scrutinise the company’s quarterly earnings call for details on pricing, launch timing and the scale of capacity it intends to bring to market.