(Bloomberg) — Meta Platforms Inc. is selling consumer subscriptions to its Meta AI chatbot for the first time, a key step toward building a business that would help offset hundreds of billions of dollars in artificial intelligence investments by the company.
Most Read from Bloomberg
The new subscriptions come in two tiers. A basic tier, priced at $7.99 per month and called Meta One Plus, is for people who frequently use Meta AI to generate images and videos or rely on it for extended reasoning, according to a company spokesperson.
A more advanced tier, called Meta One Premium, will cost $19.99 per month and include the same set of features as Meta One Plus but in greater quantities, the spokesperson added. The Meta AI subscription is rolling out in Singapore, Guatemala and Bolivia to start, with plans for more countries later.
People can continue to use the Meta AI chatbot for free for image and video generation, but will eventually run into a limit with repeated use. Meta declined to share usage limits for each level, but said the Premium plan provides meaningfully more usage than the lower tier.
Meta shares, which had been trading down slightly on Wednesday, jumped more than 3% on the news. The stock is down roughly 4% so far this year.
Meta Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg has been under pressure from investors to demonstrate that his expensive bet on AI will ultimately deliver meaningful revenue. Zuckerberg has pledged to spend at least $600 billion on AI infrastructure over the next few years, and the company is currently building a data center in Louisiana that will cost at least $200 billion. During Meta’s earnings call in April, investors balked at the company’s announcement that its capital expenditures this year would be more than initially estimated.
Meta has long argued that its AI investments are already paying off in the form of highly targeted and efficient advertising, which is improved thanks to AI models. But the company is also looking for other ways to recoup its AI spending, and consumer chatbot subscriptions have become popular with several other AI competitors, including Alphabet Inc.’s Google and OpenAI. Both rivals offer similarly priced subscription tiers.
Subscriptions for Meta’s products, which have been collectively rebranded under a program known as Meta One, are a growing focus at the social media giant as the company looks to diversify its business, which is almost exclusively driven by advertising.
