[DEDLINE]

I wonder if Meta would ever try to compete with AWS / MSFT / GOOG for AI workloads

[lifeisstillgood]

FB does not have the flywheel of running data centres - all three of those mentioned run hyper scale datacentres that they can then juice by “investing” billions in AI companies who then turn around and put those billions as revenue in the investors

OpenAI takes money from MSFT and buys Azure services

Anthropic takes Amazon money and buys AWS services (as do many robotics etc)

I am fairly sure it’s not illegal but it’s definitely low quality revenue

[miohtama]

Such barter deals were also popular during the 00s Internet Bubble.

Here more on the deals (2003):

https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/aol-saga-ope...

Popular names included AOL, Cisco, Yahoo, etc.

Not sure if Amazon’s term sheets driving high valuation are nothing but AWS credits (Amazon’s own license to print money).

[woah]

Sounds like it's free equity at the very least

[vineyardmike]

NVidia also invests in their AI customers.

[itslennysfault]

Neither did AWS when they started. They were just building out data centers to run their little book website and decided to start selling the excess capacity. Meta could absolutely do the same, but in the short term, I think they find using that capacity more valuable than selling it.

[virtuallynathan]

Facebook has more datacenter space and power than Amazon, Google, and Microsoft -- possibly more than Amazon and Microsoft combined...

[rthnbgrredf]

Meta could build their own cloud offering. But it would take years to match the current existing offerings of AWS, Azure and GCP in terms of scale and wide range of cloud solutions.

[Cthulhu_]

And then there's sales. All of those three - and more you haven't considered, like the Chinese mega-IT companies - spend huge amounts on training, partnerships, consultancy, etc to get companies to use their services instead of their competitors. My current employer seems all-in on Azure, previous one was AWS.

There was one manager who worked at two large Dutch companies and sold AWS to them, as in, moving their entire IT, workloads and servers over to AWS. I wouldn't be surprised if there was a deal made there somewhere.

[oblio]

The real question is: why aren't they? They had the infrastructure needed to seed a cloud offering 10 years ago. Heck, if Oracle managed to be in 5th (6th? 7th?) place, Facebook for sure could have been a top 5 contender, at least.

[bionhoward]

aww, those existing offerings are overcomplicated as hell, a fresh look could yield substantially simpler cloud developer experience and this would compete well against those other cloud offerings on simplicity alone

[redleader55]

For consumers, AI could just be stateless "micro service". Meta already has enough surfaces where customers can interact with AI.

[crowcroft]

I think Meta have avoided doing this because it would complicate their business priorities. They don’t really do B2B.

[carlossouza]

What do you mean by “they don’t do B2B”? They sell ads to companies, don’t they?