Meta Platforms (NASDAQ: META) has committed tens of billions of dollars to neocloud providers CoreWeave and Nebius, but a strategic pivot is now raising serious questions.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg has signaled that Meta may sell overbuilt computing capacity to other companies at a premium, effectively entering the cloud services market.
Bloomberg reports that Meta is actively building a cloud business to monetize excess AI computing infrastructure it has accumulated through major third-party deals.
The New York Times reports Meta is in talks with Anthropic, the startup behind the Claude large language model, to lease up to $10 billion in computing power over two years.
Meta currently holds $35 billion in commitments to CoreWeave (NASDAQ: CRWV), combining a previous $14 billion deal with a recently signed $21 billion expansion focused on AI infrastructure capacity.
Meta also signed a long-term agreement with Nebius Group (NASDAQ: NBIS) in March, valued at up to $27 billion over five years for AI computing resources.
Both CoreWeave and Nebius are neocloud companies, building high-performance data centers powered by Nvidia GPUs and renting computing capacity to AI developers and operators.
CoreWeave operates 43 data centers with 850 megawatts of active power and reported $2.07 billion in revenue in the first quarter, up from $982 million a year earlier.
Nebius is smaller, running five operational data centers out of eleven total, but its revenue surged from $50.9 million in Q1 2025 to $399 million in Q1 2026.
Both companies reported net losses for the quarter, with CoreWeave posting a $740 million loss and Nebius recording a net loss of $100.3 million.
The central tension for investors is whether Meta remains a valued customer to these two neocloud providers or is quietly positioning itself as a direct competitor.
Meta has demonstrated a willingness to make bold and expensive strategic bets, most notably its pivot to the metaverse in 2021, which ultimately cost the company around $80 billion before it began winding down parts of its Reality Labs division.
With earnings due on July 29, Zuckerberg and his leadership team will face pointed questions about the company’s evolving approach to AI infrastructure and cloud services.
If Meta succeeds in building its own cloud offering competitive with Alphabet, Microsoft, and Amazon, the demand flowing to CoreWeave and Nebius could eventually slow.
For now, both neocloud companies remain tied to Meta through long-term contracts, but the longer-term competitive dynamic adds a new layer of uncertainty for their investors.
