Facing investor skepticism over its artificial intelligence spending, Meta is pivoting to become an AI cloud provider, taking a page from CoreWeave’s playbook. Mark Zuckerberg outlined plans on Meta's late July earnings call to begin “selling compute directly” to other large AI firms, marking a dramatic course change for a company that had previously built gigawatts of computing capacity almost exclusively to power its own AI ambitions, including improving advertising and recommendation engines for Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. Meta has invested hundreds of billions of dollars on AI build-out, delivering two of the first gigawatt-scale campuses in Ohio and Louisiana. Zuckerberg insisted the shift was born out of market opportunity, saying, “There's just nowhere near enough compute for all the demand. We are getting a large number of offers for the compute that we have.” However, industry analysts say the decision is a response to growing Wall Street anxieties about a lack of return on Big Tech’s AI investments. After tech companies reported second-quarter earnings, investors punished firms, including Meta, that increased AI capex without demonstrating commensurate returns or a clear path to profitability. Unlike cloud providers, Meta cannot show a sales backlog demonstrating that each new kilowatt of computing capacity will directly translate into new revenue. "Meta is spending like a hyperscaler without a hyperscaler's business model," Josh Gilbert, eToro's lead APAC analyst, told Reuters.