Meta Compute: Everyone Wants To Be A Neocloud

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Meta Compute: Everyone Wants To Be A Neocloud<br>Zuck Takes Plan B? SpaceX 2.0, Bedrock 2.0, MSL Isn't Giving Up, Scaling RecSys by 10x... ClusterMAX ranking coming soon?<br>Jeremie Eliahou Ontiveros, Max Kan, Joey Brookhart, and 2 others<br>Jul 02, 2026<br>∙ Paid

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With Bloomberg headlines suggesting Meta could become a Neocloud, the market’s reaction was immediate: aggressive sell-off of Neoclouds like Coreweave & Nebius, and debates of “overcapacity” coming back. Let’s set the record straight – we believe that both takes are erroneous and that Meta’s datacenter & compute procurement will accelerate , not slow down. Capex in 2027 will be shockingly high. In just the first six months of the year, Meta has contracted over 5GW of capacity across Cloud & Colo , and that doesn’t even include all their accelerating self-build activity. Everything is computer and everything is a neocloud.

Source: SemiAnalysis Datacenter Model<br>Meta’s capacity under construction just keeps accelerating. We show below Meta’s two largest campuses – these two pictures represent 2.5GW of capacity under construction! By the way, if you believed the laughable headlines that “half of US datacenters and delayed and only 5GW are under construction”, we show you here that just two datacenters are half of this. Read our piece “Stop Saying Half of US Datacenters Are Delayed” for more on why these headlines are completely off.

Source: SemiAnalysis Datacenter Model<br>Of course, this naturally raises the questions of what Meta will do with this compute, and whether they’re going to flood the market with all of this supply if they turn into a Neocloud. Broadly speaking we see four major high-value use-cases, which are all differentied and very different relative to what traditional Neoclouds do:<br>Frontier AI Models: Meta has NOT given up on training frontier models. The bulk of incremental capacity still goes to Meta Superintelligence Labs, and we think the team is currently excited about their progress. A follow-up report will dive into MSL, their unique data strategy, and discuss their chances of catching up with Anthropic and OpenAI. Of course, our Tokenomics Model subscribers already know our takes and have access to all of this real-time.

RecSys: We believe Meta thinks they can scale up Ads recommendation systems by >10x in complexity to accelerate revenue growth. That requires both inference & training compute for their RecSys models. They can also do more generative targeted ads.

(SemiAnalysis Exclusive ) We believe that Meta is in final talks with Anthropic to get access to private instances of Claude . This would be akin to Bedrock, Foundry, Vertex from other hyperscalers (read our deep dive here). There are multiple use-cases for Meta, ranging from internal usage, to building the premier Sales & Marketing SaaS powered by Frontier AI Agents. We expect Meta to launch a token-as-a-service endpoint and increasingly move up the stack, leveraging its network and distribution. Initially it will be their own models externally and Anthropic internaly, but over time we believe they will serve Anthropic and OpenAI models externally

We expect Meta to strike a few “SpaceX-type” deals. Elon is a sales genius, and he created a brand new market segment: large-scale on-demand compute at a huge pricing premium . We think Meta wants in, but selectively. After all, just a couple hundred MWs can already drive >$10B of yearly revenue! We expect a ten billion dollar Anthropic deal to kick off the flywheel.

This high optionality, with four high-value-add options, makes it easy for Meta to keep aggressively contracting compute. Meta Superintelligence remains the core engine, but if it doesn’t work out, there are many high-margin alternatives to sell compute. It is essentially a CFO’s dream and makes it very easy to go all-in on compute – we bet Susan did a 180° flip when she saw the pricing of SpaceX compute deals! Meta won’t be a normal bare-metal IaaS vendor with ~30% gross margins – all its options are high value, and enable to easily afford paying a margin to other Neoclouds in order to accelerate their fleet buildout - even if MSL doesn’t work out.<br>Our Datacenter Model breaks down quarter by quarter their capacity additions across selfbuild, datacenter leasing, and cloud renting. After nearly 10GW of deals signed since early 2024, the bulk of their capacity additions are now through 3rd parties. We expect this to continue and believe that Meta will be a huge source of RPO growth for the likes of Coreweave, Nebius and others.<br>Our model also breaks down, quarter by quarter, Meta’s capacity into MSL, other AI, and non-AI. While MSL’s huge growth is understandable (they need to keep up with Anthropic & OpenAI!), the surge of Other AI in 2026 suggests plenty of optionality to monetize compute across RecSys, “SpaceX equivalent”, and Bedrock-type token as a service. If RecSys scales a bit less...