Meta’s founder Mark Zuckerberg has mentioned the social media big will spend lots of of billions of {dollars} on constructing enormous AI information centres within the US.
The primary multi-gigawatt information centre, referred to as Prometheus, is anticipated to come back on-line in 2026, Zuckerberg mentioned.
He mentioned one of many websites would cowl an space almost the scale of Manhattan (59.1 sq km/22.8 sq miles).
Meta has invested closely in efforts to develop what it referred to as “superintelligence” – expertise that it mentioned might out-think the neatest people.
The corporate, which has made most of its cash from internet advertising, generated greater than $160bn in income in 2024.
In a publish on his social media platform, Threads, Zuckerberg mentioned Meta was constructing a number of multi-gigawatt clusters, and that one cluster, referred to as Hyperion, might scale as much as 5 gigawatts over a number of years.
“We’re constructing a number of extra titan clusters as nicely. Simply certainly one of these covers a big a part of the footprint of Manhattan,” he added.
Prometheus can be in-built New Albany, Ohio, whereas Hyperion can be in-built Louisiana and is anticipated to be totally on-line by 2030, Zuckerberg mentioned.
He mentioned Meta would “make investments lots of of billions of {dollars}… to construct superintelligence” and that the centres had been given “names befitting their scale and impression”.
Karl Freund, principal analyst at Cambrian AI Analysis, informed the BBC, “clearly, Zuckerberg intends to spend his strategy to the highest of the AI heap”.
“The expertise he’s hiring may have entry to a number of the greatest AI {Hardware} on this planet,” Freund added.
Meta shares have been buying and selling 1% larger following the announcement, Reuters information company reported. The inventory has risen greater than 20% to date this yr.
There are at the very least 10,000 information centres all over the world internet hosting the cloud – distant servers that retailer digital info – with most of them situated within the US, adopted by the UK and Germany.
AI-driven information centres are extraordinarily vitality and water intensive. One research estimates that these centres might eat 1.7 trillion gallons of water globally by 2027. A single AI question – for instance, a request to ChatGPT – can use about as a lot water as a small bottle you’d purchase from the nook store.
