'Nowhere near enough compute for all the demand': Mark Zuckerberg tells investors why Meta is selling compute, while still buying from others

JPMorgan’s Douglas Anmuth looked for some clarity on the strategy last week on the company’s most recent quarterly earnings call. Zuckerberg’s reply offered a window into the company’s thinking.

“The high-level observation is that there’s just nowhere near enough compute for all the demand,” he said. “We are getting a large number of offers for the compute that we have, but also we have a lot of internal uses that we think are going to be quite valuable.”

What it comes down to, Zuckerberg explained, is Meta plans to monetize the company’s current compute in the short term, while simultaneously investing in the future. In his eyes, there’s plenty to go around.

“It would be foolish to basically just sell all of the compute and take a short-term profit,” he said.

Instead, said Zuckerberg, Meta has chosen to use a portion of its capital to build out compute, knowing it can monetize it when it makes sense.

The data center push

Zuckerberg doesn’t think the demand for compute is going to slow down anytime soon. That’s why, he said, Meta is continuing its push to create a growing number of data centers.

The company is in the process of building 27 data centers across the U.S. That has resulted in a shortage of construction workers who are qualified to set up the infrastructure in those buildings. To combat that, Meta unveiled the LevelUp program a little over three months ago.

That program is a multi-year partnership with real estate and infrastructure services firm CBRE, which Meta says “provides free, rapid training to turn thousands of Americans with no prior experience.”