New Delhi, July 1 -- Shares of Meta Platforms surged nearly 12% in Wednesday's trade, 1 July, climbing to $628 on the Nasdaq after a report said the social media giant is preparing to launch a cloud computing business that would sell AI computing power to external customers. The move could position Meta as a challenger to cloud leaders Amazon and Microsoft.

According to a Bloomberg report published Wednesday, Meta is exploring new ways to monetise the massive AI infrastructure it has been building for its own products. One option under consideration is offering developers access to Meta-hosted AI models, similar to Amazon Web Services' Bedrock platform.

Another proposal involves renting out raw computing capacity, allowing customers to ...