META
Meta’s trying on a new hat
Meta isn’t just building AI for its own apps anymore — according to a Bloomberg report, it’s weighing a cloud infrastructure business that would sell access to its AI compute and model access. In other words, the company may be thinking: why let all that pricey infrastructure sit there looking pretty when it could rent out the horsepower?
BofA says the bill is big, but so is the upside
BofA Securities kept a Buy rating on Meta and slapped on an $835 price target, arguing that enterprise sales could make Meta’s AI investments easier to understand — and maybe easier to stomach. The math being thrown around is wild: Wall Street expects roughly $850 billion of cumulative capex from 2026 through 2030, which is the kind of number that makes even a grown CFO blink twice.
If Meta can monetize even part of that capacity externally, the upside could be chunky. The bull case says selling half its capacity at $10 billion to $15 billion per gigawatt could translate into $100 billion to $150 billion in incremental revenue. That’s not pocket change; that’s “people will suddenly start saying ‘platform strategy’ a lot” money.
Why investors are sweating
Of course, there’s a catch — because there’s always a catch. A cloud or model API business could end up looking less like a high-margin moonshot and more like a slow, grindy Amazon Web Services-era slog. And since Meta is reportedly leasing compute from neocloud providers while considering reselling its own capacity, the margin questions practically wrote themselves.
The stock was down about 4% Thursday morning, which suggests investors are still in the “show me the money” phase. Big picture: if Meta can turn AI infrastructure into a real outside business, the capex story gets a lot prettier; if not, it’s just an even more expensive version of “trust us, the future is coming.”