Mark Zuckerberg wants to compete with Google and Amazon in AI cloud computing. And the market liked it.

Meta's plan to launch an artificial intelligence (AI) cloud infrastructure platform to sell excess computing capacity and, in practice, become a direct competitor to Google and Amazon, caused the shares of the company led by Mark Zuckerberg to soar on Wednesday, July 1st.

Shares of the tech giant that owns Instagram and WhatsApp were up more than 11% on the Nasdaq in the first hours of trading. In April, Meta announced the development of Muse Spark, the first AI model implemented by the company in the last year, but which still has no release date.

The cloud service that Meta is planning would allow developers to access AI models hosted on its infrastructure, including Muse Spark, and pay for the computing power needed to run them.

The model would be similar to Amazon Web Services' (AWS) Bedrock, which allows developers to access AI models from different companies.

The company founded by Zuckerberg also planned to sell raw AI computing capacity, according to information revealed by a source familiar with the matter.

At Meta's shareholder meeting in May, Zuckerberg stated that entering the cloud computing market was "definitely an option."

According to them, companies were contacting Meta "almost every week" to buy access to its AI models or idle computing power.

The company plans to invest approximately US$135 billion in expanding its data centers by 2026, redoubling its efforts in this regard, even as investors are concerned about Meta's ability to generate a return on the enormous investment.

The point is that, with the confirmation of the creation of this new cloud infrastructure business, there is an expectation that these concerns will be lessened.

Until then, Meta had to justify its AI investments exclusively through internal operations, while its competitors could point to their cloud computing divisions.

And while advertising revenue has boosted recent profits, there is still skepticism about the company's ability to launch a cutting-edge model to rival ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude.

Despite the surge on Wednesday, Meta's shares on Nasdaq are projected to depreciate by 6% by 2026. Over the past 12 months, the decline is 13.7%. Meta has a market capitalization of US$1.6 trillion.