- Meta launches Llama 4 API with Groq and Cerebras as partners
- Llama models offer lower costs and faster output than competitors
- Buying Cerebras and Groq could help Meta fully own AI stack
At LlamaCon 2025, Meta Platforms launched its Llama 4 API, offering pay-per-use access to its models, hosted on Meta’s own hardware and via inference partners Groq and Cerebras.
As The Next Platform noted, this move effectively turns Meta into a platform cloud provider, without needing to build a full general-purpose cloud like its rivals.
Llama is open source, widely adopted, and growing fast. It has now reached 1.2 billion downloads across its family of models. According to Meta chief product officer Chris Cox, open source AI was seen as “a dream” just two years ago. It’s now a global movement, driven by demand for transparency, control, and flexibility.
Llama 4’s Maverick and Scout models offer major cost advantages. As reported by The Next Platform, they are 21 to 31 times cheaper per million tokens than GPT-4o and also beat Gemini 2.5 Pro on price and benchmark scores.
While performance varies by workload, both models show faster output speeds in many scenarios and are optimized for common GPU platforms and newer hardware from Groq and Cerebras.
In the conclusion of his article, Timothy Prickett Morgan said: “In a briefing we joked with Cerebras that it would be nice if Meta Platforms just bought this alternative iron and got both Cerebras and Groq out of the cloud business entirely, except for maybe a few racks of gear for prototyping. SambaNova as well as these two companies were never supposed to be building hardware and trying to then build clouds. They are supposed to be making accelerators.”
The idea makes a lot of sense. Llama is on the road to becoming the Android of LLMs – open, flexible, and everywhere – and Meta could, and probably should, follow Google’s example and own the hardware stack. Buying Cerebras and Groq would bring inference fully in-house, improve integration, and reduce latency.
Right now, as The Next Platform observed, Meta relies on ads for 97% of revenue. The Llama API offers a clear new stream, one that could grow large enough to require separate financial reporting.
Meta already owns the model. Owning the stack could make it a platform.
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waynewilliams@onmail.com (Wayne Williams)
