Meta to spend up to US$65 billion this year to power AI goals, Zuckerberg says – The Business Times

META Platforms plans to spend between US$60 billion and US$65 billion this year to build out AI infrastructure, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on Friday (Jan 24), joining a wave of Big Tech firms unveiling hefty investments to capitalise on the technology.

As part of the investment, Meta will build a more than two-gigawatt data centre that would be large enough to cover a significant part of Manhattan. The company – one of the largest customers of Nvidia’s coveted artificial intelligence chips – plans to end the year with more than 1.3 million graphics processors.

“This will be a defining year for AI,” Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post. “This is a massive effort, and over the coming years it will drive our core products and business.”

Zuckerberg expects Meta’s AI assistant – available across its services, including Facebook and Instagram – to serve more than one billion people in 2025, while its open-source Llama four would become the “leading state-of-the-art model”.

Shares of the company were 1.6 per cent higher in early trading.

Big technology companies have been investing tens of billions of US dollars to develop AI-related infrastructure after the meteoric success of OpenAI’s ChatGPT highlighted the potential for the technology.

US President Donald Trump on Tuesday announced that OpenAI, SoftBank Group and Oracle will form a venture called Stargate and invest US$500 billion in AI infrastructure across the US.

Earlier this month, Microsoft said it was planning to invest about US$80 billion in fiscal 2025 to develop data centres, while Amazon.com has said its capital spending for 2025 would be higher than an estimated US$75 billion in 2024.

Meta’s planned capital spending of up to US$65 billion would mark a significant jump from its estimated capital spending of US$38 billion to US$40 billion for last year.

As part of the AI efforts, the company said it would build an AI engineer that will start contributing increasing amounts of code to its research and design efforts. It will also continue to grow the teams working on AI services. REUTERS