Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta is preparing to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on developing products based on artificial intelligence and, for this purpose, will build a huge data center, almost the size of Manhattan.
Meta – the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp – is among the tech giants that have recently secured significant contracts and offered salary packages of up to $100 million to AI researchers.
The goal: accelerating the development of systems capable of surpassing human intelligence in numerous tasks, a concept known as "superintelligence" or "general artificial intelligence," as reported by The Guardian.
The first multi-gigawatt center, named Prometheus, is expected to become operational in 2026. Another project, Hyperion, could reach a capacity of up to 5 gigawatts in the coming years, Zuckerberg specified.
"We are building other titanic clusters as well. Just one of them covers a significant part of the surface area of Manhattan," said Meta's CEO.
He also referenced a report by the specialized publication SemiAnalysis, indicating that Meta is on track to become the first AI laboratory to bring online a supercluster of over one gigawatt.
To justify the massive expenses, Zuckerberg cited the company's solid core business based on advertising: "We have the necessary capital from our operations to do this," he stated. In 2023, Meta generated revenues of nearly $165 billion.
Meta's Offensive in Artificial Intelligence
Last month, the company reorganized its AI efforts under a new division, named Superintelligence Labs, after the open-source model Llama 4 faced challenges and several key employees left. Meta hopes this division will generate new revenue streams through the Meta AI app, AI tools for video ads, and smart glasses.
According to analyst Gil Luria from DA Davidson, Meta's massive investments reflect that AI has already improved the performance of the advertising business, enabling the sale of more ads at higher prices.
In recent weeks, Zuckerberg personally led an offensive to attract talent to the Meta Superintelligence Labs, now led by former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, after Meta invested $14.3 billion in Scale.
In April, Meta revised upward its capital expenditure estimates for 2025, expected to range between $64 and $72 billion, in an attempt to gain ground against rivals OpenAI and Google.
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