Mark Zuckerberg Says Buyers Are Offering Meta a 'Significant Premium' for Its Compute — But He Turned Them Down, Calls Selling 'Foolish'

Mark Zuckerberg recently told investors that other companies are trying to buy Meta Platforms' (META) computing power at a markup — and that he intends to keep most of it anyway.

The subject came up on Meta's second-quarter earnings call on July 29, when an analyst asked how the company thinks about the offers it is fielding to sell compute while it is buying compute itself. The CEO started with the market condition. "The high-level observation is that there's just nowhere near enough compute for all the demand," he said. "That is why we see that basically we are getting a large number of offers for the compute that we have."

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In his prepared remarks, Zuckerberg had already put a price on it: "We're getting a lot of offers for compute at a significant premium over what we paid for it."

The CEO explained why the answer is mostly no. "It would be foolish to basically just sell all of the compute and take a short-term profit […] when you have the opportunity to build intelligence on top of it, which will be a multiple […] that compounds the value of the compute on top of that," he said.

That is a specific bet, and it is worth naming plainly. Zuckerberg is arguing that a GPU is worth more to Meta pointed at Meta's own products than it is worth sold to whoever is bidding for it. He framed it as a portfolio decision rather than an either-or decision. "You don't want to only do long-term things and not kind of prove the markets out that exist in the near term," Zuckerberg noted, while also saying that Meta wants "the ability to monetize the compute directly when that makes sense," alongside the intelligence built on top of it.