Meta Is Building a Cloud Business to Sell Excess AI Compute • Hacker News Board

Re: Meta Is Building a Cloud Business to Sell Excess AI Compute

#11

Post by deflator » Wed, Jul 01, 2026, 4:48 PM UTC

aabdi wrote: post #5

i wonder if we should expect this to fail by default. The meta culture has historically been known as "move fast and break things". This seems counter to a typical cloud business. Seeing how meta works in ads and business interfaces for whatsapp/instagram, it seems that 1. meta lacks support and customer success functions for enterprise 2. meta lacks b2b sales functions/culture 3. meta lacks a scrutable high quality…

Very true. I would think you could say the same about xAI too, with their pivot. They don't have experience in this sphere directly.

Re: Meta Is Building a Cloud Business to Sell Excess AI Compute

#12

Post by master_crab » Wed, Jul 01, 2026, 5:01 PM UTC

So short meta?

Re: Meta Is Building a Cloud Business to Sell Excess AI Compute

#13

Post by thelastgallon » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 3:31 AM UTC

Meta also tried building a mobile alternative to google/apple.

Re: Meta Is Building a Cloud Business to Sell Excess AI Compute

#14

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 3:42 AM UTC

wmf wrote: post #10

Meta is simultaneously so short on capacity that they're renting from Google and also have so much excess capacity that they're going to sell it.

[deleted]

Re: Meta Is Building a Cloud Business to Sell Excess AI Compute

#15

Post by thelastgallon » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 3:43 AM UTC

Did we go from a supply crisis to oversupply already? xAI(SpaceX) and Meta are already renting out compute, which means the hard fought and won GPUs/DCs/electricity can't be productively used by them and its better to find some other revenue stream.

Amazon, Google, Microsoft who may have withered AI crash (because they sell shovels) already have competition, how long before we see a lot more companies renting/selling their AI DCs?

Re: Meta Is Building a Cloud Business to Sell Excess AI Compute

#16

Post by newaccountman2 » Sat, Jul 04, 2026, 2:05 PM UTC

htrp wrote: post #4

newaccountman2 wrote: post #2

Surprised they didn't do it a long time ago. I hate the company, but I suspect their cloud provider would be a lot easier to use than the existing ones, and would be willing to use it at work.

They said the same about GCP

Which is, to be fair, somewhat easier to use than AWS, though that's a low bar and I have only done simple things on GCP.