NEW YORK: Meta Platforms plans to spend as much as US$65bil this year to expand its artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure, chief executive Mark Zuckerberg says, aiming to bolster the company’s position against rivals OpenAI and Google in the race to dominate the technology.
As part of the investment, Meta will ramp up hiring for AI roles and build a more than two gigawatt (GW) data centre that would be large enough to cover a significant part of Manhattan.
The company – among the top buyers of Nvidia’s sought-after AI chips – aims to end the year with over 1.3 million graphics processors and plans to bring about 1GW of computing power online in 2025.
“This will be a defining year for AI,” Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post last Friday. “This is a massive effort, and over the coming years it will drive our core products and business.”
Big technology firms have been investing tens of billions of US dollars to develop AI infrastructure after the success of OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Meta’s announcement comes just days after US President Donald Trump announced that OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle will form a venture called Stargate and invest US$500bil in AI infrastructure across the United States.
Earlier this month, Microsoft said it was planning to invest about US$80bil in 2025 financial year to develop data centres, while Amazon.com has said its 2025 spending would be higher than an estimated US$75bil in 2024.
“Zuckerberg is signalling to the market he does not want to be second in the AI race. The timing of the announcement was likely impacted by Stargate, which created urgency around sending a message,” D.A. Davidson analyst Gil Luria said.
Shares of Meta were trading 1% higher.
The company has emerged as a big player in the AI race with its AI chatbot, Ray-Ban smart glasses and open-source approach, which sets it apart from rivals by allowing consumers and most businesses to use its Llama AI models for free.
Zuckerberg expects Meta’s AI assistant – available across its services – to serve more than one billion people in 2025, up from around 600 million monthly active users it had last year.
The US$60bil to US$65bil capital spending outlined for 2025 would mark a significant jump from the company’s estimated expenditure of US$38bil to US$40bil for last year.
It is also above analysts’ estimate of US$50.25bil in 2025, according to LSEG data.
Meta is set to report its fourth-quarter results on Jan 29. — Reuters
