Shares of Meta Platforms (META +3.28%) fell sharply after the company missed earnings estimates in the second quarter. Revenue beat expectations, up 28% year over year to $60.8 billion, but adjusted earnings per share of $6.18 missed consensus by 15% due to heavy infrastructure spending and other costs.
Still, CEO Mark Zuckerberg sees a major opportunity in selling excess data center capacity to other companies. At the May 2026 annual shareholder meeting, he said this is "definitely on the table," and he returned to the idea on the latest earnings call.
So how much revenue could this new business generate over time? The clues are hiding in plain sight.
Image source: The Motley Fool.
Meta's cloud opportunity
On the second-quarter earnings call, Zuckerberg outlined a large opportunity to sell capacity to other businesses. The Meta Compute initiative has already landed a 1-gigawatt data center venture with BlackRock in Texas as it continues a massive build-out of compute capacity to power its platforms, advertising, and new products.
Meta ended the quarter with $226 billion in net property and equipment, including the cost of data centers. Management expects 2026 capital expenditures of $130 billion to $145 billion, which will further expand its property and equipment base.
That scale matters because it hints at what this build-out could be worth if Meta sells it as a cloud service. Zuckerberg said the company is "getting a lot of offers for compute at a significant premium over what we paid for it."
Meta has historically generated high returns on invested capital. The offers coming in above cost suggest it could still earn strong returns on its data center investments. Even selling a small portion of capacity could translate into tens of billions in revenue in the years ahead.
Put in context, that could position Meta just behind Alphabet's Google Cloud, which generated $99 billion in annualized revenue last quarter, while still trailing the leaders: Microsoft and Amazon, both at more than $100 billion in annualized revenue.
NASDAQ: META
Key Data Points
What does this mean for investors?
Of course, the cloud market is fiercely competitive. There's no guarantee Meta can match Google's end-to-end stack of chips, software, and AI models. But given what it's building, it's reasonable to think Meta's compute could land in the tens of billions, trailing Google Cloud in market share. It would still be a fairly small portion of Meta's trailing-12-month revenue of $214 billion, but it could become a larger contributor over time.
The top four hyperscalers are expected to spend up to $700 billion on capital expenditures in 2026, according to The Motley Fool's research. Goldman Sachs estimates hyperscalers will invest more than $5 trillion in technology and data centers by 2030.
If Meta can successfully monetize its computing capacity, it could unlock a growing revenue stream that diversifies the business beyond advertising. That, in turn, could support a higher valuation than the stock's current, modest 17 times forward earnings.
