What simply occurred? Meta Platforms is embarking on an unprecedented growth of its synthetic intelligence infrastructure, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg saying the development of a number of huge knowledge facilities designed to help the corporate’s ambitions in superior AI. The primary of those, a facility dubbed Prometheus, is scheduled to return on-line in Ohio in 2026.
“We’re calling the primary one Prometheus and it is coming on-line in ’26,” Zuckerberg wrote on Threads, Meta’s social media platform. “We’re constructing a number of extra titan clusters as properly,” he added, referencing extra deliberate complexes.
The dimensions of Meta’s deliberate funding is staggering. Zuckerberg said that the corporate will pour “a whole bunch of billions of {dollars}” into knowledge heart capability to pursue what he calls “superintelligence” – AI techniques that may match or surpass human capabilities at a variety of duties. “Now we have the capital from our enterprise to do that,” he wrote, underscoring Meta’s monetary energy, which is fueled primarily by promoting income from platforms like Fb, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger.
Meta’s knowledge heart buildout will embrace not solely Prometheus in Ohio but in addition Hyperion, a $10 billion campus in Richland Parish, Louisiana. Hyperion is anticipated to finally attain 5 gigawatts of capability, making it one of many largest such amenities on the planet. Zuckerberg described the brand new clusters as “multi-gigawatt,” with only one overlaying a footprint similar to a good portion of Manhattan.
Meta expects to spend between $60 billion and $65 billion on AI knowledge heart initiatives in 2025, up from $35 billion to $40 billion the earlier yr. Analyst agency SemiAnalysis has reported that Meta is on observe to be the primary firm to carry a supercluster with greater than a gigawatt of capability on-line, a milestone Zuckerberg cited in his announcement.
A key a part of Meta’s technique is assembling a world-class workforce to drive its superintelligence efforts. Over the previous yr, Zuckerberg has personally recruited consultants from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and different prime AI organizations. These efforts have included providing compensation packages valued at as much as $100 million over 4 years to lure expertise from rivals.
Among the many high-profile hires are Alexandr Wang, co-founder of Scale AI, who now serves as Meta’s chief AI officer after the corporate acquired a 49 p.c stake in his agency for $14.3 billion. Different notable additions embrace former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, co-founder of Protected Superintelligence. “For our superintelligence effort, I am centered on constructing essentially the most elite and talent-dense workforce within the trade,” Zuckerberg wrote.
