Meta Platforms, Inc. (NASDAQ:META) has fallen around 27% from its 2025 high as investors question how quickly its huge AI spending will pay back. Evercore ISI analyst Mark Mahaney now sees a strange optional answer hiding inside that spending: Meta could eventually rent a small slice of excess AI compute and create an $11 billion to $22 billion annual revenue business.
Mahaney’s August analysis is explicitly a scenario, not Meta guidance. Meta reportedly expects to reach roughly 14 gigawatts of compute capacity by 2027. Evercore estimates that leasing only 0.5 to 1 gigawatt could generate $11 billion to $22 billion of annual gross revenue depending on future GPU rental economics, potentially adding as much as $4.32 per share in earnings. Mahaney raised his price target to $860.
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The idea is compelling because Meta Platforms, Inc. (NASDAQ:META) is building hyperscaler-scale infrastructure without operating a public cloud business like Amazon, Microsoft or Google. If training demand comes in lumpy, temporarily unused capacity could become a monetizable asset instead of dead capital. A “Meta Compute” offering would also give investors a visible revenue stream tied directly to the infrastructure bill they are already being asked to fund. That could be especially valuable after free cash flow came under sharp pressure as Meta accelerated infrastructure spending.
There are two reasons to keep the scenario in its box. First, management has not announced a commercial cloud service matching Evercore’s model. Second, Mark Zuckerberg has indicated that Meta would rather use compute to create and sell increasingly valuable intelligence over the long run than optimize for short-term infrastructure rental. Renting capacity could therefore be opportunistic, not a new core business. The economics also depend heavily on 2027 GPU pricing, utilization and whether outside customers would accept Meta as an infrastructure supplier.
For positioning, the latest readily verifiable Insider Monkey count showed 254 hedge funds holding META at the end of Q2 2026, down from 262 in the prior quarter. Newer filings show Newlands holding about 9.66 million shares after trimming roughly 2%, while Fisher Asset Management held about 6.79 million after a small increase. As of August 14, short interest was about 28.05 million shares, only 1.27% of float, with 1.9 days to cover. The $22 billion opportunity should not be put into a base-case valuation yet. As a free option embedded in infrastructure Meta is building anyway, though, it makes the “AI capex is pure waste” argument considerably less tidy.
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