Meta Spends Billions on External AI Models Through Microsoft
Meta's massive spending on artificial intelligence (AI) has come to light. The company is purchasing access to AI models through Microsoft's cloud, Azure, with Meta being one of Microsoft's largest AI customers.
Bloomberg reported that Meta runs trillions of tokens a week through Azure, citing an anonymous source. This makes Meta one of the biggest buyers of AI models on Microsoft's marketplace, Foundry. Foundry resells other people's models, including those from OpenAI.
Meta is using these external models to help with software development and to assess the output of its own models. Andrew Bosworth, Meta's chief technology officer, said that the company rents leading external models as part of its development process, alongside building its own.
The concentration of AI spending between tech companies has raised concerns about the adoption of AI across the economy. OpenAI supplied around 70% of Microsoft's entire AI revenue in its most recent financial year.