California, United States (Enmaeya News) — Mark Zuckerberg said Monday that Meta Platforms plans to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to build multiple massive AI data centers aimed at superintelligence, intensifying its race for advanced technology and top engineering talent.
The social media giant (META) is among several major tech companies that have recently secured high-profile deals and offered multi-million-dollar pay packages to accelerate development of machines capable of outperforming humans in many tasks.
Meta’s first multi-gigawatt data center, called Prometheus, is expected to come online in 2026. Another facility, named Hyperion, will be able to scale up to 5 gigawatts over the next few years, Zuckerberg said in a post on his Threads social media platform.
“We're building multiple more titan clusters as well. Just one of these covers a significant part of the footprint of Manhattan,” the billionaire CEO said.
He also cited a report from industry publication SemiAnalysis that indicated Meta is on track to be the first AI lab to bring a gigawatt-plus supercluster online.
Zuckerberg emphasized the strength of Meta’s core advertising business to justify the large investments amid investor concerns over whether the spending would pay off.
“We have the capital from our business to do this,” he said.
Meta’s shares rose about 1% in trading. The stock has climbed more than 20% so far this year.
The company, which generated nearly $165 billion in revenue last year, reorganized its AI efforts last month under a new division called Superintelligence Labs after setbacks with its open-source Llama 4 model and the departure of key staff.
Meta is betting that the division will generate new revenue streams from the Meta AI app, image-to-video advertising tools, and smart glasses.
According to a separate report by The New York Times, top members of the division have considered abandoning Behemoth, the company’s most powerful open-source AI model, in favor of developing a closed alternative.
D.A. Davidson analyst Gil Luria said Meta’s aggressive AI investments have already boosted its ad business by allowing it to sell more ads at higher prices.
“But at this scale, the investment is more oriented to the long-term competition to have the leading AI model, which could take time to materialize,” Luria said.
In recent weeks, Zuckerberg has personally led a vigorous talent recruitment drive for Meta’s Superintelligence Labs, which will be led by former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang and ex-GitHub chief Nat Friedman, following Meta’s $14.3 billion investment in Scale.
Meta raised its 2025 capital expenditure forecast in April to between $64 billion and $72 billion, aiming to strengthen its position against rivals OpenAI and Google.
