Meta Emerges as Major Microsoft AI Customer
The Facebook owner spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year accessing AI models through Azure, showing how demand remains concentrated among technology companies.
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Meta has become one of Microsoft’s largest artificial intelligence customers, spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year to access outside AI models through the software company’s Azure cloud platform, Bloomberg reported on Thursday, August 20.
The Facebook owner consumes trillions of AI tokens each week through the cloud platform, the report said, citing an unidentified person familiar with the arrangement. Neither company commented publicly on the spending.
The relationship is notable because Meta is itself investing heavily in its own models and computing infrastructure. Its developers systems from several providers based on cost and availability, including OpenAI models available through Microsoft Foundry, to evaluate Meta’s own technology.
Foundry allows businesses to access and compare models from multiple developers. Microsoft said in July that more than 100,000 organizations were building on the platform.
Its largest users, however, remain concentrated in the technology industry.
ByteDance has generally been Foundry’s largest customer, while Adobe, Perplexity and customer-service AI company Sierra are also among its major users, according to Bloomberg.
That concentration is drawing attention as billions of dollars move between AI developers, cloud providers and infrastructure suppliers that are often customers, partners and investors in one another.
Bloomberg estimated that OpenAI accounted for about 70% of Microsoft’s AI revenue in its latest fiscal year, leaving the business heavily dependent on a small group of technology companies.
Meta is also developing its own service for providing access to multiple AI models, which could eventually reduce its reliance on outside platforms such as Microsoft’s.
For now, the arrangement shows that even companies spending heavily to build their own AI systems are still significant buyers of competitors’ models and computing services.
