Meta spends hundreds of millions on Microsoft's AI services

Meta has become one of Microsoft's biggest AI customers, according to Bloomberg. The company spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year accessing AI models through Microsoft's cloud service Azure. Meta burns through trillions of tokens on the platform every week.

Meta's engineers use OpenAI models available through Microsoft's Foundry marketplace, among other tools, to benchmark the performance of Meta's own models. At the same time, Meta is building its own API service that could end up competing with Foundry. It's a similar pattern to what happened with Bing. Meta once relied on Microsoft's search engine, then eventually replaced it with its own tech.

Most of Microsoft's biggest AI customers are other tech companies. ByteDance tops the list of Foundry customers, followed by Adobe, Perplexity, and Sierra. But roughly 70 percent of Microsoft's AI revenue comes from OpenAI alone, which mainly buys massive amounts of compute through Azure. Foundry accounts for only a slice of that business.

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