Not to be outdone by its close rival OpenAI, Meta has announced its plans to spend $60 to $65 billion on AI infrastructure this year, and is building a data center almost as big as Manhattan.
In a Facebook post, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced his company’s intent to build a 2GW data center, bring roughly 1GW of compute online in 2025, and end the year with more than 1.3 million GPUs.
Included in his post was a blueprint of the planned “Richland Parish Center Data Center” superimposed on a map of Manhattan (the data center will actually be in northeast Louisiana).
Work on that 4-million-square-foot, $10 billion data center in northeast Louisiana, on a 2,250-acre site, was slated to begin in December, and will continue through 2030. Once built, it will be the largest of more than 20 Meta data centers around the world.
“Meta is building the future of human connection and the technology that makes it possible,” Kevin Janda, Meta director of data center strategy, said in a statement when the project was announced in December 2024. “And this data center will be an important part of that mission.”
In addition, as part of its agreement with local government, Meta has pledged to match its electricity use with “100% clean and renewable energy” and will invest more than $200 million in local infrastructure improvements, including roads and water systems.
In his Facebook post this week, Zuckerberg wrote that Meta will also “significantly” grow out its AI teams and will build an “AI engineer” AI agent that will contribute code to Meta’s R&D efforts. Planned investments for this year already represent a 50% increase over the company’s 2024 spending, and Zuckerberg noted, “we have the capital to continue investing in the years ahead.”
His announcement comes just four days after OpenAI dropped its “Stargate Project” bombshell, and four days before Meta’s planned fourth-quarter financial reporting on Jan. 29. It also follows on the heels of US President Donald Trump’s controversial executive order on AI that specifically revokes previous administration policies that he said “act as barriers to American AI innovation.”
“This will be a defining year for AI,” Zuckerberg wrote in his Facebook post, also saying he expects that Meta AI will be the world’s “leading assistant,” serving more than 1 billion people, and that Llama 4 will become the “leading state-of-the-art model.”
“This is a massive effort, and over the coming years it will drive our core products and business, unlock historic innovation, and extend American technology leadership,” he wrote. “Let’s go build!”
Big tech racing to build the data centers of the future
Undoubtedly one of the biggest stories out of the tech world this week was the US President Donald Trump-endorsed Stargate Project, an ambitious, $500 billion initiative to build out AI infrastructure in the US for OpenAI over the next four years. It is an industry collaboration, with participation from OpenAI, Oracle, SoftBank, MGX, Arm, Nvidia and Microsoft, and will deploy $100 billion “immediately,” OpenAI said in a blog post earlier this week.
Other industry players are investing as well. Microsoft has announced its intent to spend $80 billion in fiscal year 2025, more than half of which will be in the US. Amazon continues to pour money into data centers — including $11 billion in new infrastructure in Georgia — and says it will exceed its $75 billion 2024 capex expenditures. And other leading data infrastructure companies like Databricks and Snowflake continue to invest billions.
Source:: Network World