Tech

Mark Zuckerberg says Meta will build 'hundreds of gigawatts' of AI capacity over time

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty Images
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Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Monday that the company is launching a new "top-level" initiative called Meta Compute, as it pours more money into the data centers and infrastructure powering its AI push.

Zuckerberg said Meta plans to build "tens of gigawatts" of capacity this decade and "hundreds of gigawatts or more" over time.

"How we engineer, invest, and partner to build this infrastructure will become a strategic advantage," Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook post.

The move signals that Zuckerberg views AI infrastructure as a key competitive advantage and is placing it under a dedicated unit that reports directly to him. Meta has said it plans to invest $600 billion in US infrastructure and jobs, including AI data centers, by 2028.

The Department of Energy provides a few handy comparisons for the amount of power in one gigawatt: It's roughly half the output of the Hoover Dam, or the power of 2,627 Tesla Model 3s. Famously, the DeLorean, the iconic time machine in "Back To The Future Part II," needed 1.21 gigawatts to travel through time.

Santosh Janardhan, the company's head of infrastructure, and Daniel Gross, who joined Meta last year from AI startup Safe Superintelligence, will lead the new Meta Compute initiative.

The two executives will work closely with Dina Powell McCormick, Meta's newly appointed president and vice chairperson, who will focus on partnering with governments and sovereign entities to help build and finance infrastructure. Powell McCormick is a former deputy national security advisor to President Donald Trump and spent 16 years at Goldman Sachs.

Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

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Pranav Dixit
Pranav Dixit
Pranav Dixit is the Meta Correspondent at Business Insider based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He writes about Meta’s products, policies, and internal workings while examining how the company’s decisions shape how billions of people connect and communicate.Previously, Pranav was the India-based technology correspondent for BuzzFeed News, covering the impact of Silicon Valley’s largest companies on the culture, society, and politics of more than a billion people in South Asia. He has also been a senior news editor at Engadget and ran technology coverage at the Hindustan Times, one of India’s largest national newspapers.Pranav’s reporting has shed light on the human consequences of Big Tech’s quest for growth in emerging markets, and sparked widespread conversations about the impact of American technology companies on the Global South. In 2019, he won Syracuse University’s Mirror Award for a boots-on-the-ground feature about how WhatsApp misinformation sparked gruesome lynchings in rural India. He has also reported from Kashmir, a volatile geopolitical hotspot, documenting the world’s longest-running internet shutdown.His work has been widely cited by major national and international publications, and he has been featured on the BBC, Al Jazeera, and podcasts such as Vox Media’s Land of the Giants to discuss his work. He has also spoken in journalism classes including at UC Berkeley’s graduate journalism program. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, Vox, Time, The Information, and Al Jazeera.Pranav moved to the United States in 2021 from New Delhi, India, to be a fellow at Harvard University’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism, where he studied the evolution of the American tech press and ways newsrooms around the world can cover technology and society more effectively.Got a tip about Meta or anything else in Silicon Valley? Contact Pranav via encrypted messaging app Signal (+1408-905-9124), or email him at pdixit@insider.com or pranavdixit@protonmail.com. You can also reach him on WhatsApp at +857-753-3949 or DM him on X (@PranavDixit) or BlueSky (@pranavdixit.bsky.social).Pranav keeps sources anonymous. Please use a non-work device to reach out.Expertise: Meta, Facebook, WhatsApp, Llama, AI, Threads, Instagram, Mark Zuckerberg, social media, platforms, immigration