Meta plans to invest $60 billion to $65 billion in capital expenditures and grow its artificial intelligence (AI) teams “significantly” this year, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a Friday (Jan. 24) post on Facebook.
Saying this will be a “defining year” for AI, Zuckerberg said Meta is building a data center large enough to cover “a significant part of Manhattan,” will bring online 1 gigawatt of compute and will have more than 1.3 million GPUs by the end of 2025.
Zuckerberg said this infrastructure will power the company’s AI efforts that include Meta AI, which he expects will serve more than 1 billion people this year; Llama 4, which he said will become “the leading state of the art model;” and a new AI engineer now being built that will contribute code to Meta’s R&D efforts.
“This is a massive effort, and over the coming years it will drive our core products and business, unlock historic innovation, and extend American technology leadership,” Zuckerberg said in the post.
This capital expenditure would be 50% higher than the estimated amount Meta invested in 2024 and more than double the amount it invested in 2023, Bloomberg reported Friday.
Wall Street estimates had expected the company to allocate a smaller amount than that announced by Zuckerberg — $51.3 billion — to capital expenditures this year, according to the report.
Zuckerberg’s announcement follows news of several other investments in AI infrastructure.
President Donald Trump said Tuesday (Jan. 21) that an up-to-$500 billion project called Stargate will build AI-focused data centers in the U.S. Equity partners in Stargate are SoftBank, which will be responsible for funding the venture, OpenAI, Oracle and MGX, an AI-centered sovereign wealth fund in Dubai.
On Jan. 7, Amazon Web Services (AWS) said it plans to invest at least $11 billion in Georgia to expand infrastructure to support cloud computing and AI technologies. The company said this move is part of its ongoing infrastructure investments across the country.
Microsoft said Jan. 3 that it plans to invest $80 billion to build data centers in fiscal 2025 to power the development and use of AI. When making the announcement, Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith said the company is doing so amid a “golden opportunity for American AI.”
