First AI data supercluster going online in 2026, Zuckerberg says

Miami Herald

7 hours ago

July 14 (UPI) -- Meta will invest in "hundreds of billions of dollars" in artificial intelligence with the world's first supercluster online next year, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Monday.
Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads, is significantly boosting its expenditures on AI.
"For our superintelligence effort, I'm focused on building the most elite and talent-dense team in the industry," Zuckerberg posted on Facebook. "We're also going to invest hundreds of billions of dollars into computing to build superintellitence. We have the capital from our business to do it."
In April, Meta raised its 2025 capital expenditure forecast to between $64 billion and $72 billion, primarily on data centers and servers, as well as growing its AI teams. One year ago it was a high of $40 billion.
Last month, Meta spent $114 billion for a stake in Scale AI and brought in CEO Alexandr Wang. Also in June, he formed a new organization called Meta Superintelligenc of top AI researchers and engineers.
Meta would be the first lab to bring online a supercluster of 1 gigawatt, or one billion watts, to train advanced AI models and handle the workloads, according to SemiAnalysis.
A gigawatt is enough to power as many 800,000 homes for a full year.
"Meta Superintelligence Labs will have industry-leading levels of compute and by far the greatest compute per researcher," Zuckerberg posted on Facebook. "I'm looking forward to working with the top researchers to advance the frontier."
The first supercluster will be called Prometheus and will be built in New Albany, Ohio, south of Columbus, using gas turbines.
Another cluster, called Hyperion, will be able to scale up to 5 gigawatts in Richland Parish in northeast Louisiana. It will take until 2030 to be fully built out at 4 million square feet.
"We're building multiple more titan clusters, as well," he said. "Just one of these covers a significant part of the footprint of Manhattan."
Meta is attempting to break away from a reliance on third-party companies to power their business, including Apple and Google app store regulations.
Zuckerberg wants to compete against Microsoft-backed OpenAI, Amazon-backed Anthropic, Google and Perplexity. The company's debut of Llama 4 AI models in April drew lukewarm response from developers, CNBC reported.
Meta hopes Superintelligence Labs will drive revenue through the Meta AI app, ad tools and smart glasses, Wall Street Pit reported.
Meta's stock rose 1.01% to 724.76 at midday Monday.
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