Meta is advancing its cloud ambitions by recruiting Dave Brown, one of Amazon Web Services' most senior vice presidents, to lead its data-center buildout, and is in early talks to sell spare computing capacity to AI company Anthropic. These moves confirm that Mark Zuckerberg's cloud ambitions, which he called 'definitely on the table' at Meta's May shareholder meeting, are becoming concrete hires, deals, and organizational decisions. Brown will report to Meta's head of infrastructure and is expected to join in the coming weeks, bringing nearly two decades of cloud infrastructure experience from AWS. Meta has committed to spending as much as $145 billion in capital expenditures in 2026, the high end of guidance set in April, and funded part of that with a $25 billion bond sale timed alongside its first-quarter earnings report. Zuckerberg said companies were approaching Meta 'almost every week' seeking access to its AI models or spare compute. The Anthropic talks, reported by the Wall Street Journal, are early and no terms have been agreed, but represent the first named potential enterprise customer. Meta would position itself as a capacity provider to organizations running large AI workloads. Paul Meeks, head of technology research at Freedom Capital Markets, told CNBC the cloud push appears partly designed to address investor skepticism about whether Meta will earn a proportionate return on its massive capex.