Mark Zuckerberg announced on Monday that Meta Platforms plans to invest hundreds of billions of dollars to build massive AI data centers as part of its ambitious push toward superintelligence, escalating a fierce competition for top engineering talent.
Meta joins other tech giants that have recently secured high-profile deals and offered multi-million-dollar compensation packages to accelerate the development of AI systems capable of outperforming humans in various tasks.
Zuckerberg shared that Meta’s first multi-gigawatt data center, called Prometheus, is expected to be operational by 2026. Another facility, Hyperion, is designed to scale up to 5 gigawatts in the coming years. “We’re building multiple more titan clusters as well. Just one of these covers a significant part of the footprint of Manhattan,” he wrote on his Threads platform.
He also highlighted a report from industry publication SemiAnalysis projecting Meta as the first AI lab to bring a gigawatt-plus supercluster online.
Addressing investor concerns about the scale of the spending, Zuckerberg cited the strength of Meta’s core advertising business to justify the massive investment: “We have the capital from our business to do this.”
Meta’s stock rose 1% following the announcement, continuing a gain of over 20% so far this year.
Last year, the company generated nearly $165 billion in revenue and recently reorganized its AI efforts into a new division called Superintelligence Labs after facing setbacks with its open-source Llama 4 model and key staff departures. The division aims to generate new revenue streams from the Meta AI app, image-to-video advertising tools, and smart glasses.
Analyst Gil Luria of D.A. Davidson noted that Meta’s AI investments have already enhanced its advertising business by enabling 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,” he said.
In recent weeks, Zuckerberg has led an aggressive recruitment effort for the Superintelligence Labs, which will be headed by former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang and ex-GitHub chief Nat Friedman, following Meta’s $14.3 billion investment in Scale.
In April, Meta raised its 2025 capital expenditure guidance to between $64 billion and $72 billion, aiming to strengthen its position against rivals OpenAI and Google.
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