After spending billions… Meta turns its artificial intelligence into a paid service technology

The American company “Meta” intends to impose fees on its artificial intelligence services integrated into its various platforms, such as “Facebook”, “Instagram”, and “WhatsApp”, in an attempt to compensate for the artificial intelligence expenses made by the company, according to a report by the American “Wall Street Journal”.

The new fees come in the form of a monthly subscription worth about $8 for the first package and $20 for the largest package, according to statements by the company’s official spokeswoman to the Wall Street Journal, while maintaining the presence of the free package of services, with the main difference between the two packages being in the computing power that the user consumes.

The new subscriptions coincide with the company offering a set of subscriptions and additional benefits on its social media platforms, with prices starting at $4 for Facebook and Instagram and $3 for the WhatsApp platform.

The subscription package includes access to the company’s artificial intelligence platform through a dedicated application, in addition to a website that simulates the services of OpenAI and Anthropic, according to a report by the American news network CNBC.

For its part, Meta revealed the start of testing the new subscriptions in a clip published by Naomi Glit, head of the company’s product department, via her Instagram account, indicating the possibility of there being one joint package that includes access to the benefits of subscriptions on its platforms with the benefits of artificial intelligence.

The CNBC report indicates that testing of the new subscription package will begin in Singapore, Guatemala, and Bolivia during the next month, with the possibility of offering an additional package that will make users pay more when exploiting more computing power of “meta” models for artificial intelligence.

It is worth noting that last month, Meta revealed the first major artificial intelligence model since Alex Wang, the former founder of the Scale AI platform, joined the company.

The new model comes under the name “Muse Spark”, and it is the first in a series of artificial intelligence models that comes under the name “Muse” that was developed by the artificial intelligence landmarks of “Meta”.

News of the provision of new subscriptions to artificial intelligence services caused Meta’s shares to rise by about 4% on global stock exchanges.

Try to make up for big spending

The report of the American website “Fortune” reveals the huge size of the budget for artificial intelligence by “Meta” during the past year and the current year, as it said that the company spent about 72 billion dollars during the past year on its artificial intelligence sector, which represents an increase of more than 30 billion dollars over the company’s spending in the previous year.

Meta also intends to spend more than $140 billion on artificial intelligence during the current year 2026, thus becoming one of the largest spending companies on artificial intelligence technologies and its various aspects.

In the same context, Meta dismissed 8,000 employees in the past weeks to replace them with artificial intelligence, in addition to 1,400 other employees during the past hours at the company’s headquarters in Washington, according to a report by the American technical website TechRepublic.

Spending on artificial intelligence brings back memories of what happened previously with virtual reality technologies, as Meta’s losses from the virtual reality and augmented reality technologies sector reached more than $80 billion over 5 years, after the company’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, pushed all his efforts and his teams to develop virtual reality technologies. He even changed the company’s name to directly indicate its location in the virtual world, according to a report by the American technical website TechCrunch.

So it was expected that Meta would start collecting subscriptions to run its AI models, but the real question remains, will it succeed in recouping these expenses?