Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg introduced Friday that the corporate plans to construct an enormous information heart in Louisiana to energy its latest AI mannequin, Llama 4, which is ready to launch this 12 months.
In a Fb submit, Zuckerberg stated the corporate would make investments greater than $60 billion into AI together with the info heart, which he famous could be “so massive it might cowl a major a part of Manhattan.”
“This will likely be a defining 12 months for AI. In 2025, I anticipate Meta AI would be the main assistant serving greater than 1 billion folks, Llama 4 will develop into the main state-of-the-art mannequin, and we’ll construct an AI engineer that may begin contributing growing quantities of code to our R&D efforts,” Zuckerberg wrote.
The challenge would mark a major leap in Meta’s capital expenditures, which had been round $38 billion to $40 billion in 2024, Susan Li, Meta’s chief monetary officer, had beforehand stated. Within the Fb submit, Zuckerberg stated regardless of these main expenditures, the corporate has “the capital to proceed investing within the years forward.”
The announcement comes alongside a broad surge in AI funding, with President Donald Trump asserting earlier this week the launch of Undertaking Stargate — an AI infrastructure three way partnership with OpenAI, Oracle and Softbank — which goals to kind a brand new firm that would embody investments of as much as $500 billion over the subsequent 4 years.
That challenge has caught the attention of different prime tech executives, together with SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who discovered himself in a feud with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman after responding to an X submit asserting the enterprise that “they don’t even have the cash.”
AI know-how has been a sizzling matter for a lot of tech firms, with the rising recognition of AI fashions from firms like OpenAI, Meta and Anthropic. Nvidia, an organization that makes graphics processing items, or GPUs — specialised pc chips which are used to coach AI fashions — had one of many highest market capitalizations in 2024 and is presently valued at round $3.6 trillion.
Trump additionally signed an government order Thursday that goals to additional the event of AI know-how within the U.S., with a acknowledged aim of eradicating insurance policies that act as “obstacles to American AI innovation” and growing “AI methods which are free from ideological bias or engineered social agendas.”
In Friday’s announcement, Zuckerberg stated he expects that “Meta AI would be the main assistant serving greater than 1 billion folks” and that “Llama 4 will develop into the main state-of-the-art mannequin.”
With the addition of the info heart, he stated, the corporate is ready to finish the 12 months with greater than 1.3 million GPUs. Final January, Zuckerberg stated Meta could be buying 350,000 H100 graphics playing cards from Nvidia, a deal price billions of {dollars}.
Zuckerberg had talked about the info heart challenge final month in an Instagram Reel asserting the discharge of Meta’s Llama 3.3 mannequin, noting that the middle could be used to construct “future variations of Llama.” The challenge will likely be in-built Richland Parish, a rural space in northeast Louisiana with a inhabitants of roughly 19,000 folks, in response to census information.