• Meta held its annual shareholder meeting on Wednesday.

• Facebook Plus and Instagram Plus are priced at $3.99 per month, and WhatsApp Plus at $2.99 per month; the Meta AI subscription starts at $7.99 per month.

• Stocktwits sentiment for META flipped to ‘bullish’ from ‘bearish.’

Meta Platforms, Inc. shares rose 3.4% to a one-month high on Wednesday before edging slightly lower overnight, after the tech giant announced subscription offerings for its flagship apps — Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp — and outlined early plans to open its cloud computing infrastructure to external businesses.

The news coincided with the company’s annual shareholder meeting. During the meeting, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said his company could enter the cloud computing market if it overspends on data centers and ends up with excess capacity, CNBC reported.

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“It’s definitely on the table,” Zuckerberg reportedly said, in response to a question about potentially competing with Amazon and Microsoft in cloud computing. Reiterating a view from the company’s last earnings call in April, Zuckerberg said that “almost every week there are different companies that come to us from outside asking us to both stand up an API service or asking if we have compute that they could buy from us at some premium to what we’ve bought it at.”

Earlier in the day, Meta announced the rollout of subscription plans for its apps, with Facebook Plus and Instagram Plus priced at $3.99 per month and WhatsApp Plus at $2.99 per month, according to details shared with multiple media outlets.

The company also said subscriptions for its AI chatbot, Meta AI, would cost $7.99 per month for the basic tier and $19.99 per month for the premium tier.

Crucially, the developments come just a week after the social media giant laid off 10% of its 78,000-person workforce, in part to fund its AI spending. Last month, Meta raised its 2026 guidance for AI-related capital expenditures to between $125 billion and $145 billion, up from a prior range of $115 billion to $135 billion.

Metaverse To AI To Cloud Computing?

Meta has been investing billions of dollars into new data centers, acquisitions, and engineering talent as it pivots to make AI development its central focus. It acquired an over-$14 billion stake in AI startup Scale AI and appointed its co-founder, Alexandr Wang, to lead a newly created Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL) division.

Until the start of 2025, Zuckerberg was heavily invested in creating metaverse applications and ecosystem, a direction the company has since abandoned. In January this year, the company cut over 1,000 employees from Reality Labs, the unit responsible for the metaverse, and is in the process of shutting down Horizon Worlds, the virtual reality social network for Quest VR headsets.