Meta launches Muse Spark 1.1 paid API at 75% lower cost

Meta is shifting from an open-weights strategy to a direct commercial assault on the AI labs' high-margin API business. By pricing Muse Spark 1.1 as a lost-leader for customer acquisition, Meta aims to lure developers into its ecosystem before its 'Iris' custom silicon and 14GW compute footprint fully mature by 2027. For the streaming and advertising sectors, this provides a lower-cost path for high-volume agentic automation in content moderation and ad optimization. Watch the delta between Meta’s internal benchmarks and independent scores on Terminal-Bench 2.1 to see if developer trust in Meta’s reporting recovers.

The launch of Muse Spark 1.1 coincides with a massive expansion of Meta’s physical footprint and silicon independence. Per Meta’s Q1 2026 guidance, the company raised its annual capital expenditure target to a range of $125 billion to $145 billion, double its 2025 spend. This includes the July 2026 announcement of a $10 billion, one-gigawatt data center in Alberta, Canada. According to Bloomberg, these investments underpin a new internal business unit called 'Meta Compute,' designed to monetize excess GPU capacity by competing directly with hyperscalers like AWS and Google Cloud.

Meta is also moving to de-risk its supply chain following a March 2026 incident where Google Cloud reportedly informed Meta it could not fulfill its requested Gemini capacity. According to the Financial Times, this shortage disrupted Meta’s internal AI projects for months, highlighting the vulnerability of relying on a direct rival for infrastructure. To counter Nvidia’s dominance, Meta confirmed in July 2026 that it will begin mass manufacturing its custom 'Iris' AI chip in September through partnerships with Broadcom and TSMC, aiming to drastically lower inference costs for models like Muse Spark.

Simultaneously, Meta’s integration of the Model Context Protocol (MCP) reflects the rapid stabilization of AI standards. Anthropic originally donated MCP to the Linux Foundation’s Agentic AI Foundation in December 2025 to solve the 'n×m' integration problem. By reaching 97 million installs by March 2026, MCP has become the plumbing for enterprise agents. Meta’s native support for this protocol, combined with a $20 credit for new API users, is a calculated attempt to capture the high-volume 'agentic loop' market where token efficiency determines project viability.