Meta becomes a major Microsoft AI customer while building a rival platform

$META is reportedly spending hundreds of millions of dollars per year on Microsoft Azure AI services.
Meta is consuming trillions of tokens weekly through Azure Foundry and is even using OpenAI models to evaluate outputs from its own AI systems.
That makes Meta one of $MSFT's largest AI customers.
But the relationship may eventually become more competitive.
Meta is building its own multi-model API service that could compete directly with Azure Foundry and reduce its dependence on Microsoft.
For $META and $MSFT, this is a perfect example of how the AI ecosystem can make companies customers and competitors at the same time.