Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg said the social media giant will spend hundreds of billions of dollars on building huge artificial intelligence (AI) data centers in the US.
Just one site would cover an area nearly the size of Manhattan, New York, according to Zuckerberg. The first multi-gigawatt data center, dubbed Prometheus, is expected to come online in 2026.
Zuckerberg has been on a multibillion-dollar AI hiring spree in recent weeks, highlighted by a US$14 billion investment in Scale AI. He also recently announced the creation of Meta Superintelligence Labs, which will be run by some of his company’s most recent hires.
Meta’s “superintelligence effort”
As part of Meta’s “superintelligence effort,” Zuckerberg is focused on “building the most elite and talent-dense team in the industry,” he said in a social media post. “We’re also going to invest hundreds of billions of dollars into compute to build superintelligence. We have the capital from our business to do this.”
Zuckerberg added that Meta is building several multi-gigawatt data centers, including Hyperion, “which will be able to scale up to 5GW over several years.” Meanwhile, “Meta Superintelligence Labs will have industry-leading levels of compute and by far the greatest compute per researcher. I'm looking forward to working with the top researchers to advance the frontier!” Zuckerberg said.
Karl Freund, principal analyst at Cambrian AI Research, told the BBC: “Clearly, Zuckerberg intends to spend his way to the top of the AI heap. The talent he is hiring will have access to some of the best AI hardware in the world.”
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AI-heavy workloads trigger transformative period for data centers
Most data center facilities aren’t ready for AI-heavy workloads with the sector set for radical transformation, according to recent research from global data center consultancy BCS.
In a survey of over 3,000 data center professionals across 41 countries, 85 percent of respondents admitted that their facilities are not yet prepared for the demands of AI-heavy workloads, with just one in seven organizations using AI at scale.
To address this lack of readiness, many of those polled (79 percent) are increasing their infrastructure to facilitate AI readiness, while 63 percent believe AI could ease pressure on staffing and operations.
“We’re entering a pivotal moment for the data center industry. As AI moves from buzzword to backbone, it’s reshaping not just what we build, but where, how and why we build it,” said James Hart, CEO at BCS.
“The infrastructure that powered the last decade of digital growth isn’t enough for what comes next. From compute-heavy model training to real-time inference at the edge, new demands are emerging that call for fresh thinking, faster decisions and more flexible, sustainable solutions.”
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