How the Potential $10 Billion Compute Lease Deal Between Meta Platforms and Anthropic Affects Neocloud Stocks

Meta Platforms (NASDAQ: META) has caused some angst for neocloud stockholders. The company allegedly plans to launch its own cloud business to lease access to AI computing power and AI models, and given the scale of the data centers it's constructing, it could become a serious competitor in the space.

Those concerns intensified after reports emerged that Meta Platforms and Anthropic are discussing a compute deal for up to $10 billion that would run over 2 years. No official announcements have been made, so there are no details yet about how many gigawatts such a deal could involve.

Neither company has confirmed the talks, which were described as early-stage conversations by the unnamed source. However, it appears that Meta Platforms is serious about entering the cloud infrastructure industry, and its entry could affect key players.

Image source: Getty Images.

Can Meta Platforms turn from the biggest customer to the biggest seller

While Meta Platforms is building a 5-gigawatt data center in Louisiana and gobbling up as much computing hardware as possible, AI demands present a challenge for the company. Many investors are wondering how it will be able to reliably sell computing power when it is buying compute heavily from other companies for its own needs.

For instance, Meta Platforms recently signed a five-year, $27 billion deal with Nebius (NASDAQ: NBIS) for additional compute.

However, Meta Platforms might have plenty of compute available within the next few years. In January, Mark Zuckerberg shared in a Threads post that he expects the company to build tens of gigawatts of AI infrastructure this decade, and "hundreds of gigawatts or more over time."

Meta Platforms still needs compute for its social networks, large language models (LLMs), and AI glasses. Since the company closed Q1 with 3.56 billion daily active users across its social networks, it has greater compute needs than almost any other company.

It's a long-term risk that may arrive too late to matter

Meta Platforms has used the copycat model to take out rival platforms like Vine and limit Snapchat's growth prospects, but it likely won't play out that way with the neoclouds. The AI industry is moving too quickly, and Meta Platforms' own compute needs will continue to grow. By the time it gets its cloud leasing business off the ground at meaningful scale, the winners of the industry may have already been decided.

Hut 8 (NASDAQ: HUT) recently announced that it had expanded an existing contract with a "high-investment-grade tenant." The updated lease has a 15-year term covering 352 megawatts. The contract's total value is $9.8 billion, averaging $653 million per year. The company's 1-gigawatt Beacon Point AI data center is poised to produce more than $1.75 billion in net operating income from its contracts.

Meta Platforms is one of several companies that fit the "high-investment-grade tenant" description. If it was Meta Platforms expanding its contract, that would be a clear signal that the social media company still needs a lot more compute than it has online, in which case it won't be in a good position to sell capacity for a while. However, if the unnamed tenant wasn't Meta Platforms, the deal still highlights something investors should pay attention to: Companies that need AI compute aren't waiting around for Meta to figure out its cloud segment.

Diversification may become more important

Meta Platforms is a hyperscaler already, and if it has enough excess compute that it can start selling some of it, it theoretically won't have to buy compute from competitors. Granted, Meta Platforms would actually have to build tens of gigawatts' worth of AI data centers this decade, but investors should consider what would happen if this scenario is realized.

The extremely pessimistic take for the neoclouds is that Meta Platforms and other hyperscalers will build enough of their own data centers to fully meet their needs, after which they will not need neoclouds like Nebius or CoreWeave. Those companies have lucrative contracts with the giants right now, but they may be renegotiated to less profitable rates or simply not renewed at all if hyperscalers have sufficient capacity within their own AI data centers.

Compute seller Iren (NASDAQ: IREN) has demonstrated that it can diversify its customer base beyond the hyperscalers. The company announced this week that it had secured $2.8 billion in new customer contracts with "leading AI developers." The number of megawatts was not specified, but the average contract length is four years.

The company now has 10 customers, including "a new leading AI developer," the name of which it may reveal in its upcoming earnings report. Iren also raised its 2026 annual recurring revenue target to over $4 billion, indicating that demand is not slowing.

Even if hyperscalers were to wind down their usage of neocloud providers, that might not be a problem for them. Neoclouds like Nebius could ink agreements to sell their critical IT load to new customers one to two years in advance, getting those commitments on the books ahead of the expirations of their current contracts. AI developers and hyperscalers have already demonstrated they are willing to wait that long for power.

With that in mind, investors shouldn't be worried about the latest headlines around Meta Platforms. If the neoclouds need to look elsewhere for customers, they should have little trouble finding them.

Marc Guberti has positions in Iren. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Meta Platforms. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.