Meta Platforms Inc.‘s (NASDAQ:META) reported plans to rent out artificial intelligence infrastructure have reignited Wall Street’s debate over how the social media giant will monetize its massive AI investments—and one prominent market voice believes investors still aren’t fully appreciating the opportunity.
“I find it difficult to believe that Meta was up only 49 points when it is getting into the most lucrative game, business-to-business at 18x EPS????” CNBC’s Jim Cramer wrote on X after reports emerged that Meta is exploring a cloud infrastructure business that would allow developers to access its AI models and compute capacity.
JPMorgan analyst Doug Anmuth believes the opportunity could be far larger than many investors realize.
From AI Spending to AI Revenue
According to Bloomberg, Meta is considering charging developers to access AI models hosted on its infrastructure while also renting excess compute capacity to third parties, a strategy similar to AI cloud providers that lease GPU clusters to enterprise customers.
For Meta, the move could create an entirely new revenue stream beyond advertising.
JPMorgan estimates that every gigawatt of AI infrastructure made available to external customers could generate roughly $20 billion in annual revenue and add several dollars to earnings per share, providing meaningful returns on the company’s enormous AI infrastructure investments.
The analysts said monetizing infrastructure would also give Meta greater flexibility by allowing it to recoup part of the billions of dollars it continues to spend building AI data centers and compute capacity.
But Is Selling Compute the Best Use of Meta’s AI?
While the revenue opportunity is compelling, JPMorgan isn’t convinced renting GPUs is Meta’s best long-term strategy.
Instead, the firm argues it would rather see Meta deploy that compute internally to power AI products across its ecosystem of roughly 4 billion users—including business agents, Meta AI, smart glasses and future AI services—where the long-term value creation could ultimately exceed infrastructure rental revenue.
That view aligns with comments CEO Mark Zuckerberg made during Meta’s annual shareholder meeting, where he acknowledged there is clear external demand for compute but said the company has prioritized reserving capacity for its own AI ambitions. Zuckerberg added that selling infrastructure could become an option if Meta eventually determines it has built more capacity than it needs.
A New Way to Value Meta?
The debate extends beyond cloud computing.
For years, investors have viewed Meta primarily as an advertising company funding an expensive AI buildout. If the company begins generating meaningful recurring revenue from cloud infrastructure alongside its AI products, Wall Street may have to start valuing Meta as more than a social media platform.
Instead of simply asking whether Meta’s AI spending is too high, investors could soon be asking a different question: how much is the infrastructure itself worth?
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