Meta to spend ‘hundreds of billions' on AI data centres

Times

4 days ago

Mark Zuckerberg has said that Meta Platforms will spend 'hundreds of billions of dollars' on building data centres to power artificial intelligence, including one with a footprint almost the size of Manhattan.
Its first 'multi-gigawatt' data centre, which will be called Prometheus, is set to come online next year, the billionaire technology executive wrote on Threads, his social media platform, while another, called Hyperion, would scale up to 5 gigawatts over 'several years'.
'We're building multiple more titan clusters as well,' he said. 'Just one of these covers a significant part of the footprint of Manhattan.'
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He pointed to a report from SemiAnalysis, an industry publication, that Meta was on track to be the first AI lab to bring a gigawatt-plus supercluster online.
The American technology giant is 'focused on building the most elite and talent-dense team in the industry', Zuckerberg wrote.
The world's largest technology companies have stepped up efforts to attract top engineers with multimillion-dollar pay packages to fast-track work on machines that could out-think humans on many tasks, part of an AI arms race that has gripped the industry.
Sam Altman, the boss of OpenAI, claimed that Meta Platforms had started to make 'giant offers' to a lot of OpenAI staff to beef up its own roster of engineers.
The announcement from Meta came as President Trump joined executives from some of America's largest technology companies at a summit in Pittsburgh, ahead of an expected push in the coming weeks to make it easier for power-generating projects to connect to the grid, and also provide federal land on which to build the data centres needed to expand AI technology,
Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, had 'the capital from our business' to fulfil its data centre ambitions, Zuckerberg insisted.
However, investors have become increasingly sensitive to the billions of dollars that the largest technology groups are ploughing into AI infrastructure, highlighted by the DeepSeek episode earlier this year. Advancements unveiled by the Chinese AI start-up wiped hundreds of millions off the market value of Meta Platforms, Amazon and Nvidia, the chipmaker.
Zuckerberg's company, which has a market value of $1.8 trillion, was once seen as a leader in open-source AI models.
The California-based business was co-founded as Facebook by Zuckerberg, who changed the name to Meta Platforms in 2021 to shift the company's focus to the metaverse. However, it is fighting the perception that it may have fallen behind in the AI race, after its initial set of Llama 4 large language models, released in April, fell short of performance expectations.
It has also delayed the rollout of Behemoth, its main AI model, which had been scheduled for release in the same month.