Meta to spend billions building gigawatt-size data centers for AI
"We're calling the first one Prometheus and it's coming online in '26' Zuckerberg wrote Monday in a post on his social platform Threads, referring to a project in Ohio. "We're building multiple more titan clusters as well,' he added, a nod to other planned data center complexes.
Frustrated by the quality of Meta's past AI efforts, Zuckerberg has been investing heavily in the energy, computing power and talent needed to compete in the fast-moving AI race.
In April, Meta said it could spend as much as $72 billion on capital expenditures this year, with a focus on AI and the data centers used to train and run the models.
Over the past several months, the CEO has personally recruited a team of experts seeking to achieve "superintelligence,' the notion that machines can perform as well as or better than humans at many tasks. This kind of generative AI demands even more power, which has sparked an industrywide rush to build large data centers and secure expensive chips from suppliers like Nvidia.
The new Meta Superintelligence Labs team includes researchers poached from OpenAI, Google's DeepMind and other top AI companies. Meta recently tapped Scale AI co-founder Alexandr Wang as chief AI officer, and spent $14.3 billion on a 49% stake in his firm.
Zuckerberg also successfully courted former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, AI startup founder Daniel Gross, and Apple's Ruoming Pang — who was lured to Meta with a compensation package valued at more than $200 million, Bloomberg News reported.
Zuckerberg on Monday described the data centers under development as multigigawatt "clusters,' which would rank among the largest in the world. Meta is building its biggest facility in Richland Parish, Louisiana, which the Facebook co-founder has touted as being nearly the size of Manhattan.
While most data centers today house only hundreds of megawatts of capacity apiece, several AI and major technology companies like OpenAI and Oracle are involved in plans to develop facilities capable of handling several gigawatts, or enough energy to power nearly 900,000 homes annually, according to Carbon Collective. That scale of power is seen as necessary to achieve superintelligence. In his post, Zuckerberg cited analyst firm SemiAnalysis as saying Meta is on track to be the first with a "supercluster' that houses more than a gigawatt of capacity.
Shares of the Menlo Park, California-based company have gained 23% this year through Friday's close.
In his post on Monday, Zuckerberg reaffirmed that the company is going to invest "hundreds of billions of dollars' into data center capacity to build superintelligence. "We have the capital from our business to do this,' he wrote.
Meta, which makes the vast majority of its revenue from advertising on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger, has continued to see year-over-year growth in sales.
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