Meta Platforms has become one of Microsoft's largest AI customers, underscoring the trend that the main demand for cutting-edge AI technologies is still concentrated within the tech sector itself, rather than in traditional businesses.
Meta Platforms has become one of Microsoft's largest AI customers, underscoring the trend that the main demand for cutting-edge AI technologies is still concentrated within the tech sector itself, rather than in traditional businesses.
According to Bloomberg sources, the tech giant spends hundreds of millions of dollars each year on access to AI models through Microsoft’s Azure cloud service. Meta developers use trillions of tokens each week through Microsoft’s Foundry platform.
Microsoft's main strategy in the field of AI is to sell access to models from various developers through the Foundry marketplace, which as of July had 100 thousand customers. Although Microsoft often demonstrates cooperation with industrial or transportation giants in promotional materials, the lion's share of revenues is generated by other IT companies:
ByteDance (owner of TikTok) remains the largest buyer of services on the Foundry platform;
Meta is an active consumer of computing power and models;
other key clients: Adobe Inc., AI search engine Perplexity, and startup Sierra.
In addition, about 70% of Microsoft's total AI revenue in the last fiscal year was provided by its main partner, OpenAI.
Meta is spending heavily on AI to accelerate its own software development. It buys access to various platforms based on price and resource availability. In particular, Meta engineers use OpenAI technologies through Azure Foundry to evaluate the quality and accuracy of its own AI models.
As Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth noted, renting leading third-party models during development is standard practice for the company.
The concentration of profits only within the IT industry is of concern to analysts: for investments in AI to meet expectations, the technology must be massively implemented in the real sector of the economy.
Moreover, the cooperation between Meta and Microsoft may be temporary: the company is actively building its own AI data centers and developing its own API service, which in the future will compete with Foundry and allow it to abandon Microsoft services.
Meta has previously collaborated with Microsoft - since the late 2000s, Facebook has been using the Bing search engine, but in 2014 it completely abandoned it in favor of its own developments.
