Meta has become one of Microsoft’s biggest AI customers, spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year on Azure to access AI models for software development and model evaluation, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The person said Meta uses trillions of tokens a week through the service.

Microsoft said in July that Azure AI Foundry, its marketplace for AI models, had 100,000 customers.

The spending extends an existing partnership. Microsoft brought Llama 2 to Azure and Windows in 2023, and later added Meta’s Llama 3 models to the Azure AI model catalog in 2024.

ByteDance was generally Foundry’s biggest spender, and people familiar with the business said Microsoft’s biggest AI customers were still mostly tech companies.

OpenAI, Microsoft’s longtime partner, provided about 70% of Microsoft’s overall AI revenue in the latest fiscal year.

Meta’s Azure use also comes as the company expands its own infrastructure.

Meta said its 2026 capital expenditure would be US$115 billion to US$135 billion, driven largely by AI infrastructure and data centers.

🔗 Source: Bloomberg

Recent Meta developments