Capex Without a Revenue Line: What Meta's Compute-Leasing Talks Signal About the AI Infrastructure Trade
On a Friday when semiconductors fell into a bear market on worries about AI capital spending, Meta was reported to be in early talks to lease out computing power. That looks like a contradiction and is actually the market's own answer to its own complaint. Among the big four hyperscalers, Meta is the only one with no public cloud — no channel to resell a single GPU-hour — which is exactly why its capex draws the most scrutiny. Here's what a compute-leasing business would change, and how to price it.