For years, the received wisdom on Madison Avenue and in Silicon Valley has been that Meta makes its money one way: by selling advertising, mostly on phones, mostly to people who would rather not think too hard about how much data that entails.

But the company appears to be studying for a new exam.

Second-quarter earnings reports from Alphabet, Microsoft and Amazon — the three companies that dominate the cloud computing business — showed that their cloud divisions are growing faster than nearly anything else in their portfolios. This is significant because all three companies have committed to spending, collectively, some $725 billion on artificial intelligence infrastructure. The cloud businesses, it turns out, are what pay for all those chips.

Meta, which does not currently sell cloud computing services to outside customers, has begun talking about the possibility that it might. (One imagines the PowerPoint decks are already being printed.)

The shift, if it materializes, would represent a notable departure for a company that has spent two decades perfecting the art of showing advertisements to people looking at photographs of their cousins. Cloud computing is a business-to-business enterprise, sold to chief technology officers rather than to consumers scrolling through their feeds at 11 p.m.

Whether Meta can credibly enter a market dominated by Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud — each of which has been building data centers and enterprise sales teams for the better part of 15 years — remains an open question. The company has invested heavily in A.I. infrastructure for its own purposes, particularly for the large language models that power its various assistants and recommendation systems.

Selling that infrastructure to others would be something else entirely.

Still, in an era when the bill for artificial intelligence is measured in the hundreds of billions, it is perhaps unsurprising that even the largest advertising company in the world might look for a second revenue stream — preferably one that does not depend on whether people are still willing to click.

Original story published in adweek.com: "Cloud Is the Cash Engine Funding Big Tech’s $725bn AI Bill, and Meta Wants In"