Meta Plans to Sell Idle AI Computing Power, Triggering Tech Stock Turmoil and Shift to Computing Rental

On July 1, 2026, Bloomberg reported that Meta is building a cloud infrastructure business called "Meta Compute" to sell idle AI computing power and model access externally. This sparked market concerns about AI infrastructure oversupply, causing sharp declines in tech stocks: China's ChiNext fell 5.71%, STAR 50 dropped 7.70%; the US semiconductor index fell 5.44%, CoreWeave plunged 14%, and Nebius fell 17%. However, Meta was later revealed to be still ramping up AI investment: according to Business Insider, its next-generation model "Watermelon" requires an order of magnitude more training compute than its predecessor, matching GPT-5.5 performance; Caixin reported that Meta signed a contract with Samsung for over 10 trillion Korean won (about $1 billion) for 2nm chip foundry orders. Analysts believe Meta is optimizing existing assets rather than halting AI investment, with the sold computing power mainly being older inference GPUs. Meta's stock initially rose over 10% after the news before retreating.