Analyst Urges Meta to Turn AI Compute Into a Cloud-Style Business

Meta is facing renewed pressure from Wall Street to do more with its AI compute, with one analyst urging the company to start “renting out” its AI capacity in a cloud-like offering. The argument, highlighted in a Yahoo Finance report, is framed as a way to translate Meta’s heavy spending on AI infrastructure into an additional revenue stream rather than keeping it solely tied to internal product development and advertising systems.

The report says New Street Research believes Meta should establish a broader cloud business, explicitly positioning its AI capability as something external customers could buy. In that view, Meta’s advantage would be its access to large-scale AI tooling and data pipelines, along with the operational know-how required to run expensive training and inference workloads efficiently.

Alongside the operational recommendation, the Yahoo Finance piece reiterates a Buy rating and a $700 price target for Meta shares. The update reflects a common market question for megacap technology companies spending aggressively on artificial intelligence: not just whether the spend improves existing products, but whether it can be monetized through new services that capture demand from enterprises and developers.

Meta’s public communications routinely discuss AI as a core capability across its apps and infrastructure, and the company’s newsroom is where it regularly updates product and research announcements. While the Yahoo Finance report does not, in the material provided here, describe a specific new product name, contract structure, or launch timeline, the framing aligns with how large tech firms increasingly market AI platforms: with compute access, developer tooling, and managed services designed to reduce the friction of building and deploying AI systems.

In a broader industry context, the push to monetize AI capacity comes as demand for specialized hardware and high-performance data center operations remains a bottleneck for many organizations trying to adopt machine learning at scale. Companies without their own infrastructure typically rely on cloud providers, so any credible alternative that can deliver reliable performance, security controls, and predictable costs could resonate with buyers, especially for inference workloads that run continuously.

There is, however, a major caveat. The Yahoo Finance report, as represented in the details available here, does not include specifics on how Meta would operationalize “renting out” capacity, including what customers would be able to procure (raw GPUs versus managed training and deployment), how pricing would work, or whether Meta would partner with existing infrastructure providers. It also does not provide evidence of a near-term commercialization plan in the material provided.

Investors watching the story next will likely focus on whether Meta indicates any concrete steps that move beyond internal AI buildout, such as changes in product packaging, enterprise-focused go-to-market moves, or disclosures about partnerships or infrastructure monetization. Until those details emerge, the recommendation should be treated as an analyst thesis rather than a documented company plan, even as it is tied to a specific rating and price target in the coverage.

For Meta, the strategic upside of a cloud-style business would be diversification and potentially higher-margin recurring revenue, but the execution risks are non-trivial. Any effort to sell compute and AI services externally would need to meet expectations around availability, latency, security, compliance, and cost discipline, areas where established cloud players already compete aggressively. Without additional disclosures, it remains unclear how Meta would differentiate and how quickly it could build a service ecosystem comparable to dedicated cloud platforms.