Meta to spend hundreds of billions on data centers

Published: 2025-07-15 07:00:59 ET META

Published on 07/15/2025 at 07:00

By Nicolas Thomas

After recent high-profile hires, Mark Zuckerberg is talking about a multi-hundred billion dollar investment plan for massive AI infrastructure.

Mark Zuckerberg announced on Monday that Meta Platforms would invest hundreds of billions of dollars in the construction of gigantic data centers dedicated to artificial intelligence, with the aim of developing superintelligence systems. This strategy is part of a fierce battle to attract the best talent in the sector and stay ahead of competitors such as OpenAI and Google.

The Meta CEO said the company is building several multi-gigawatt data centers, the first of which, called Prometheus, is expected to go live in 2026. A second, called Hyperion, will be capable of reaching 5 gigawatts of power in the coming years. "We are building several additional titanic clusters. Each one covers an area equivalent to a significant portion of Manhattan," he wrote on Threads, Meta's social network.

Zuckerberg cited a report by SemiAnalysis that Meta is on track to become the first company to deploy an AI supercluster exceeding one gigawatt.

Faced with questions from investors about the profitability of these massive expenditures, the Meta boss highlighted the strength of his core business, online advertising. "We have the capital to do this, thanks to our business," he assured.

Meta's stock rose 1% on Monday and is up more than 20% since the beginning of the year. In 2024, the company generated revenue of nearly $165bn.

Last month, Meta reorganized its artificial intelligence activities into a new division called Superintelligence Labs, following several setbacks, notably around its open-source model Llama 4 and the departure of key members. This entity aims to generate new revenue through the Meta AI app, image-to-video advertising tools, and smart glasses.

According to the New York Times, some members of the unit are considering abandoning Behemoth, the company's most powerful open-source model, to develop a closed alternative.

"Meta is investing heavily in AI, which has already improved its advertising performance by increasing the volume and price of ads," said Gil Luria, an analyst at D.A. Davidson. "But at this scale, the investment is clearly geared toward a long-term competition to develop the dominant AI model, which could take time."

Zuckerberg is personally leading a recruitment drive to strengthen the Superintelligence Labs team, now headed by Alexandr Wang, former CEO of Scale AI, and Nat Friedman, former executive at GitHub. Meta had injected $14.3bn into Scale, a company specializing in data annotation for training AI models.

In April, Meta raised its capital expenditure forecast for 2025 to between $64bn and $72bn, with the aim of consolidating its position against its main rivals.

Nicolas Thomas