San Francisco (United States) (AFP) – Meta has made a cloud computing deal with Google worth more than $10 billion over the course of six years, a source close to the transaction told AFP Thursday. The source confirmed a report at tech news outlet The Information about the arrangement, which will include Meta using Google datacenter servers, storage, networking, and other services. Meta declined to comment.
Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has embarked on a major artificial intelligence spending spree, poaching top researchers with expensive pay packages from rivals like OpenAI and Apple as he builds a team to pursue what he calls AI superintelligence. “I’m excited to build personal superintelligence for everyone in the world,” Zuckerberg said in an earnings call late last month.
Meta is locked in a bitter rivalry with other tech behemoths as they invest heavily in AI. The deal with Meta is among the biggest in the 17-year history of Google’s cloud unit, according to the source. Google parent Alphabet’s cloud computing business was on pace to bring in $50 billion over the course of the year, the company said in a recent earnings report.
Meta also reported robust second-quarter financial results and significantly increased its capital expenditures to $17 billion in the quarter, primarily for AI infrastructure investments. Meta projected total 2025 capital spending between $66 billion and $72 billion.
A strong quarter “won’t shield Meta from questions concerning the company’s future as it breathlessly tries to keep up in the AI race,” Emarketer analyst Minda Smiley said of the quarterly earnings. In a post outlining Meta’s AI strategy, Zuckerberg has signaled that the remainder of the decade would be a transformative period for artificial intelligence development and that the company’s priority was to bring AI to its users.
© 2024 AFP
