Meta faces a fundamental choice about its $130-145 billion AI infrastructure investment: sell excess capacity now or keep it for future development.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg told investors on Wednesday's earnings call that the company is fielding "a lot of offers for compute at a significant premium" over what it paid. But he warned against taking short-term profits at the expense of long-term AI ambitions.

"A common trade-off that we need to make is around how much do you monetize something today versus develop future assets," Zuckerberg said. "It would be foolish to basically just sell all of the compute and take a short-term profit."

The comments came as Meta bumped up its 2026 capital expenditure guidance by $5 billion on the low end. Anthropic is reportedly in preliminary talks to lease computing power from Meta, according to CNBC.

Why Meta's enterprise push matters

Meta remains the only major US hyperscaler without a cloud infrastructure business, despite capital spending that rivals Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. The company is exploring enterprise services beyond raw compute capacity, including API access and AI agents.

"That's going to be somewhat a new muscle that we build as a company," Zuckerberg acknowledged about entering enterprise sales. "But I think it's a very important one that we build."

Dave Brown, a former Amazon Web Services executive, recently joined Meta to help build this capability.

The urgency stems partly from Meta's AI strategy, which has lagged behind OpenAI and Google in frontier models. Under new AI chief Alexandr Wang, Meta recently launched the Muse Spark 1.1 model for coding and agentic work at lower prices than competitors.

Meta's stock fell over 7% in after-hours trading Wednesday after the company issued weaker third-quarter revenue guidance. Free cash flow dropped 90% year-over-year due to soaring infrastructure spending.

The Reality Labs division, focused on VR and metaverse projects, lost $4.62 billion on just $431 million revenue in the latest quarter. Digital advertising still accounts for 98% of Meta's total revenue.

Zuckerberg remains committed to the AI buildout despite investor skepticism. "My personal bet is that the people who invest in this are going to be rewarded and feel very good over time," he said.