Meta could look to enter the cloud computing game and compete with hyperscalers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.

As reported by CNBC, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed that the company was open to moving toward a cloud computing offering during the company's annual shareholder meeting, saying that "it's definitely on the table."

Zuckerberg added that the company is seeing interest "almost every week" from companies asking if they can "stand up an API service or asking if we have compute that they could buy from us at some premium to what we've bought it at."

While Meta does not currently offer cloud computing services, its capex on increasing compute capacity has been on par with the largest cloud companies. During its latest earnings call, Meta CFO Susan Li revealed the company was upping its capex expectations for the year to the realm of $120 billion to $135 billion, which she said "reflects our expectations for higher component pricing this year and, to a lesser extent, additional data center costs to support future-year capacity."

Meta has been laying off significant numbers of employees so as to free up cash flow for the data center spend. Earlier this month, the company said it was looking to slash around 10% of its staff, with around 8,000 employees set to leave globally. In addition, plans to hire 6,000 workers have been canceled, while another 7,000 employees are set to be reassigned to new AI initiatives.

At the start of the year, the company established a new division dedicated to growing its data center capacity, dubbed "Meta Compute," which Zuckerberg said was "planning to build tens-of-gigawatts this decade, and hundreds-of-gigawatts or more over time."

Despite all these efforts to increase capacity, Zuckerberg said during the recent shareholder meeting that the company has not yet pursued a cloud business offering for the time being: "We think we have a use for that compute. Obviously, if we get to a point where we feel we have overbuilt, then it's an option we have, and that is partially what gives us confidence in investing in building this out."

This confidence is partially evidenced by the fact that, alongside building out its own capacity, Meta has itself signed massive capacity agreements with cloud and neocloud providers. Meta signed a $27 billion cloud agreement with Nebius, which will initially include a $12 billion agreement over five years, starting in 2027; a $21 billion agreement with fellow neocloud CoreWeave; and a "multibillion-dollar" agreement with AWS to use the cloud's Graviton5 AI chips.