Wall Street has spent the last six months questioning Mark Zuckerberg’s aggressive AI capital spending, with Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META | META Price Prediction) raising its 2026 capex guidance to $125 to $145 billion after a Q1 in which revenue grew 33% year over year. While investors debate whether Meta is overspending, a quieter filing from SpaceX just laid out a monetization playbook that Zuckerberg would do well to study.
In its recently disclosed S-1, SpaceX revealed that in May 2026 it signed Cloud Services Agreements with Anthropic granting access to compute capacity across its COLOSSUS and COLOSSUS II supercomputers. The terms are striking. Anthropic agreed to pay $1.25 billion per month through May 2029, with capacity ramping in May and June 2026 at a reduced fee, and either party may terminate on 90 days’ notice. SpaceX explicitly states that this structure monetizes unused compute capacity while still permitting reallocation for its own internal initiatives whenever needed.
The AWS Precedent Meta Cannot Ignore
I have held Meta since December 2022 and read every transcript Zuckerberg has put out on infrastructure. The pattern is familiar. Amazon Web Services was built originally to handle Amazon’s own retail spikes. In 2006, Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) opened that excess capacity to outside developers. Two decades later, Andy Jassy is running AWS at a $150 billion annualized run rate, growing 28% year over year, with an AI-specific run rate exceeding $15 billion just three years into the AI cycle.
Jassy said on the most recent call: “AWS is growing 28%, our fastest growth in 15 quarters, on a very large base.” Hyperscale infrastructure built for internal use tends to become a generational business when its owner decides to rent the excess. That is not a coincidence. It is a structural feature of capital-intensive technology platforms.
Meta Has Every Ingredient Except the Decision
Look at what Meta is already building. Q1 2026 capex hit $19.8 billion, up roughly 47% year over year. The 2026 guide nearly doubles 2025’s actual spend of $72.2 billion. Zuckerberg told investors that Meta is “rolling out more than one gigawatt of our own custom silicon” developed with Broadcom alongside AMD and NVIDIA systems. At the same time, Meta announced approximately 8,000 layoffs alongside the capex raise, a deliberate shift from labor to compute as the primary driver of future output.
CFO Susan Li was explicit on scale: “These multiyear cloud deals and our infrastructure purchase agreements drove a $107 billion step up in our contractual commitments this quarter.” She also acknowledged the planning uncertainty, noting that if Meta ends up not needing as much capacity as anticipated, it can choose to bring it online more slowly or reduce spending in future years. Meta is building flexibility into a fleet that will inevitably have periods of underutilization between training runs. SpaceX has now demonstrated exactly how to monetize those gaps: short-notice-terminable contracts with frontier labs that pay hyperscaler-grade economics for capacity you can reclaim whenever your own roadmap demands it.
The $100 Billion Optionality
This is a thesis on optionality, and I want to be clear about that framing. If Meta sold even a fraction of its excess capacity to one large frontier customer at terms similar to SpaceX’s Anthropic arrangement, that is a multi-billion-dollar annual revenue stream at near-pure incremental margin. Layer it onto a company already producing operating margins above 40% with a current market cap of approximately $1.4 trillion, and a re-rating in the neighborhood of $100 billion of additional market cap becomes a reasonable bull-case scenario.
The Azure comparison sharpens the point. For Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), commercial remaining performance obligation climbed to $627 billion in the most recent quarter, up 99% year over year, with the OpenAI relationship alone accounting for roughly 45% of that backlog after a $250 billion Azure commitment. A single anchor customer can reshape a platform’s entire valuation story.
The SpaceX filing tips its competitive intent clearly, stating it intends to sell excess capacity to a limited number of third parties, potentially positioning it as a competitor to CoreWeave and Nebius as well as the hyperscalers. The same filing names Meta directly as a foundational-model competitor. The race for compute customers has begun, and Meta is the lone top-tier player still on the sidelines.
The Risk Side, Honestly
Meta selling compute to Anthropic or any frontier lab would mean powering its competitors. Zuckerberg has talked openly about needing to “fully optimize the stack” for Meta’s own agents, including the company’s newly launched Meta Superintelligence Labs and its first proprietary foundation model, Muse Spark. Investor patience is finite: the stock is down roughly 14% year to date, sitting around $550 against a 52-week high above $796. But Meta’s family of apps still has 3.56 billion daily active people, and Reality Labs is still bleeding $4.03 billion a quarter, with cumulative losses in that division now exceeding $90 billion. A high-margin compute revenue stream would strengthen the investment case on both fronts simultaneously.
If you believe Meta’s AI investment cycle will pay off in product, you should also want management to consider every adjacent monetization path the AWS history book opens up. SpaceX just publicly priced the option at $1.25 billion per month. The operator who rents the excess capacity earliest tends to win the decade. Zuckerberg has the compute, the balance sheet, and the engineering culture to run that play. The only question is whether he wants to.
Editor’s note: This piece has been updated to reflect Meta’s Q1 2026 capex of $19.8 billion and the company’s concurrent 8,000-employee reduction; Microsoft’s commercial RPO has been refreshed to $627 billion (up 99% year over year) from the most recent earnings report; Meta’s current market cap has been updated to approximately $1.4 trillion; the stock’s year-to-date decline has been corrected to roughly 14%; and the Reality Labs cumulative loss figure of more than $90 billion has been added for context.
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