What Meta’s Potential Pivot May Signal About AI Spending

On the July 13, 2026, episode of The Morning Filter podcast, hosts Susan Dziubinski and Morningstar Chief US Market Strategist Dave Sekera explained what Meta Platforms META selling its excess compute capacity to external customers could suggest about artificial intelligence spending and what it may mean for the company. Here’s an excerpt from the conversation.

What Meta’s Move Suggests About AI Spending

Susan Dziubinski: A report surfaced last week that Meta Platforms will be renting its excess artificial intelligence compute capacity to external customers. What do you make of that, Dave?

Dave Sekera: This was a really interesting development, and I think the market’s still trying to wrap its arms around what exactly it means. From the investors I’ve spoken with and the analysts on the street, I think there are really two camps of thought.

The first camp is that investors have been concerned about Meta’s ability to really generate long-term returns on all of the capex spending that they’re making today. People thought there was a bit of a lack of clarity as far as how they’re going to monetize all this infrastructure spending. In this case, what the company is doing is just selling that excess capacity they have here in the short term until they end up using that capacity themselves over the long term and monetizing it.

The second camp out there is that this is just indicative of too much excess capacity in AI compute already today. And thus far, maybe this is actually a harbinger that there’s just enough capacity out there already. This could indicate that they’re going to have to start slowing that capex spending because you can’t build too much excess compute. Now, in and of itself, our analysts didn’t think that this was meaningful to Meta’s evaluation. We still think that Meta has a long way to go to be able to match the capabilities of the other hyperscalers, so we didn’t change our valuation on this.

In our view, we think this is probably more that first camp where they’re just selling off some of that short-term excess capacity until they start using it up themselves over the next couple of years.

Is Meta’s Stock a Buy Today?

Dziubinski: So, we didn’t change the fair value on Meta on this news, but does the stock still look undervalued?

Sekera: Well, not as undervalued as it was. The stock, I mean, it’s up 18% since they made just that announcement. It’s still at a 21% discount, still enough to put it in 4-star territory, but not anywhere near that margin of safety we thought that stock was trading at prior to the announcement.

Subscribe to The Morning Filter on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts, and keep up with the latest research from hosts Susan Dziubinski and David Sekera on Morningstar.com.