Meta (META) stock has slid about 4% over the last year amid concerns about its massive AI data center investments. But CEO Mark Zuckerberg appears to have a plan to make a return on that spending beyond Meta’s traditional advertising business.
Last week, he told Bloomberg that renting data center space makes sense given ongoing industrywide constraints on AI computing. Zuckerberg has been hinting at using excess capacity in recent investor calls, though he hasn’t committed to it yet.
But SpaceX (SPCX) has proven such a move can be quite lucrative. The company has inked deals to rent capacity to Anthropic and Google worth billions.
“Zuckerberg is probably like, ‘If we do have some excess capacity— and we do want to do the SpaceX type of deals they cut with Anthropic and Google — maybe we’ll do that, and we’ll monetize half a [gigawatt] or one [gigawatt],’ whatever the excess is,” TD Cowen analyst John Blackledge told Yahoo Finance.
Entering the data center business, however, would also mean entering into direct competition with the likes of Amazon (AMZN), Microsoft (MSFT), and Google (GOOG, GOOGL), as well as smaller neocloud companies like CoreWeave (CRWV).
Taking advantage of early spending
In 2025, Meta spent a whopping $72.2 billion on capital expenditures, with the bulk of that going toward its AI build-out. And it plans to spend even more this year: between $125 billion and $145 billion.
That prodigious outlay is going toward facilities like Meta’s upcoming Canadian data center announced last week, as well as toward expanding its massive Hyperion data center in Louisiana, which will support 5 gigawatts of capacity.
Meta’s spending, however, has given some investors pause over concerns that it’s overinvesting in data center space.
During the company’s Q3 2025 earnings call, however, Zuckerberg said he believes it makes sense to frontload AI spending now so Meta can quickly capitalize on AI advances in the future rather than playing catch-up.
If the company overbuilds, he contends, Meta could allocate additional capacity to other internal efforts, he’s said.
If it has even more capacity left over? Meta could serve it up to external parties eager for computing. And that could be a boon to the company.
“In a market choked by grid power shortages and hardware bottlenecks, [Meta] can clip a fat coupon by leasing some capacity — in the CEO’s own words, ‘at some premium to what we’ve bought it at,’ ” Jefferies analyst Brent Thill wrote in an investor note.
If Meta does end up leasing out its data center space, the next question becomes, for how long? SpaceX’s deal with Anthropic technically runs through May 2029, but either party can call it off with 90 days’ notice.
