6 days ago
Zuckerberg says Meta will build data center the size of Manhattan in latest AI push
Mark Zuckerberg proclaimed that Meta would spend hundreds of billions of dollars on developing artificial intelligence products in the near future and, to that end, construct a data center planned to be nearly the size of Manhattan.
The parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp is among the large tech companies that have struck high-profile deals, and doled out multimillion-dollar pay packages to AI researchers in recent months – some as high as $100m – to fast-track work on machines that could outthink humans on many tasks, a concept known as 'super-intelligence' or 'artificial general intelligence'.
Its first multi-gigawatt data center, dubbed Prometheus, is expected to come online in 2026, while another, called Hyperion, will be able to scale up to 5 gigawatts over the coming years, Zuckerberg said.
'We're building multiple more titan clusters as well. Just one of these covers a significant part of the footprint of Manhattan,' the billionaire CEO said.
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He also pointed to a report from industry publication SemiAnalysis that Meta was on track to be the first AI lab to bring a gigawatt-plus supercluster online.
Zuckerberg touted the strength in the company's core advertising business to justify the massive spending amid investor concerns on whether the expenditure would pay off.
'We have the capital from our business to do this,' he said.
The company, which generated nearly $165bn in revenue last year, reorganized its AI efforts last month under a division called Superintelligence Labs after setbacks for its open-source Llama 4 model and key staff departures. It is betting that the division will generate new cashflows from the Meta AI app, image-to-video ad tools and smart glasses.
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DA Davidson analyst Gil Luria said Meta was investing aggressively in AI as the technology has already boosted its ad business by allowing it to sell more ads and at higher prices.
In recent weeks, Zuckerberg has personally led an aggressive talent raid for the Meta Superintelligence Labs, which will be led by former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang and ex-GitHub chief Nat Friedman, after Meta invested $14.3bn in Scale.
Meta had raised its 2025 capital expenditure predictions to between $64bn and $72bn in April, aiming to bolster the company's position against rivals OpenAI and Google.
