Meta Moves to Sell Its Excess AI Compute

What I Read This Week: a summary of the content that I consumed this past week…

On June 29, Palantir and Nvidia announced a partnership to run AI inside classified and air-gapped government systems, meaning networks cut off from the public internet. The deal pairs Nvidia’s chips and open Nemotron models with Palantir’s data software, enabling agencies to run modern AI on secret data without it leaving their control. As these customized models are used in production, teams can continually improve them within their own environments using new data and feedback.

Three days later, Microsoft made the same case. They launched Microsoft Frontier Company, a new business with a $2.5 billion budget and 6,000 engineers who embed inside customers to build and run their AI. Microsoft called it a step “beyond forward-deployed engineering,” in which a customer’s data, IP, and expertise are never used to train models that would commoditize them.

“The last thing any of us want is a world where every company across every sector is ceding value to a few models that eat everything they see… There is no societal permission for an AI future that hollows out entire industries.” - Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft

There are also discussions about how the public should have a stake in that AI future. On July 2, the Financial Times reported that OpenAI has discussed giving the U.S. government a 5% stake, worth about $42.6 billion against the $852 billion valuation it set in March. The pitch is to establish a sovereign wealth fund structure in which Washington would hold a 5% stake in each major U.S. AI company. The idea is to give the public a financial interest in AI companies so they can share in the upside.

On July 1, Bloomberg reported that Meta is developing plans to build out a cloud business, called Meta Compute, to sell its spare AI computing power and hosted models to outside customers. The effort is run by infrastructure chief Santosh Janardhan, Meta Superintelligence Labs’ Daniel Gross, and company president Dina Powell McCormick.

This idea follows up on what was discussed at their May shareholder meeting. Zuckerberg said, “It’s definitely on the table,” in response to a question about potentially competing with Amazon and Microsoft in cloud computing. He also discussed the opportunity last year, sharing that “every week there are different companies that come to us from outside asking us to both stand up an API service or asking if we have compute that they could buy from us at some premium to what we’ve bought it at.”

The move mirrors SpaceX and other capacity holders that turned spare infrastructure into a revenue line. If this initiative works out, Meta will join Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Oracle in the public cloud arena, with only Apple remaining the sole private compute hyperscaler.

On July 1, Together AI raised $800 million at an $8.3 billion valuation, led by Aramco Ventures, with Nvidia and others joining. Together AI is a neocloud that rents out GPU computing power but bundles that hardware with its own software for running open models like DeepSeek and Kimi. It says the combination reduces the cost of serving a model by up to 80% compared with closed systems from OpenAI or Anthropic.

Annual bookings crossed $1.15 billion last quarter, with customers including Cursor, Cognition, and Decagon, and open-model use across the industry tripled in twelve months. Together has lined up commitments for more than 500 megawatts of compute, with expectations to grow capacity roughly 50-fold over five years.

The same day, Venice AI raised $65 million at a $1 billion valuation, with crypto fund Dragonfly leading the round. Venice is a privacy-first alternative from ShapeShift founder Erik Voorhees that encrypts prompts on your device and keeps no record of your chats. It is already profitable on about $70 million of annualized revenue with 3 million users.

All-In: I Sovereignty Wars, Palantir-Nvidia Deal, SCOTUS Birthright Ruling, Newsom’s CA Budget Lie