Meta’s Zuckerberg pledges hundreds of billions for AI data centres in superintelligence push

Meta Platforms chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said on July 14 it would spend hundreds of billions of dollars to build several massive artificial intelligence (AI) data centres for superintelligence, intensifying his pursuit of a technology he has chased with a talent war for top engineers.

The social media giant is among the large tech companies that have struck high-profile deals and doled out multi-million-dollar pay packages in recent months to fast-track work on machines that could outthink humans on many tasks.

Its first multi-gigawatt data centre, dubbed Prometheus, is expected to come online in 2026, while another, called Hyperion, will be able to scale up to 5 gigawatts (GW) over the coming years, Mr Zuckerberg said in a post on his Threads social media platform.

“We’re building multiple more titan clusters as well. Just one of these covers a significant part of the footprint of Manhattan,” the billionaire CEO said.

He also pointed to a report from industry publication SemiAnalysis that Meta was on track to be the first AI lab to bring a gigawatt-plus supercluster online.

Mr Zuckerberg touted the strength in the company’s core advertising business to justify the massive spending amid investor concerns on whether the expenditure would pay off.

“We have the capital from our business to do this,” he said.

Meta shares were trading 1 per cent higher. The stock has risen more than 20 per cent so far in 2025.

The company, which generated nearly US$165 billion (S$211 billion) in revenue in 2024, reorganised its AI efforts in June under a division called Superintelligence Labs after setbacks for its open-source Llama 4 model and key staff departures.

It is betting that the division would generate new cash flows from the Meta AI app, image-to-video ad tools and smart glasses.

Top members of the unit have considered abandoning Behemoth, the company’s most powerful open-source AI model, in favour of developing a closed alternative, The New York Times reported separately on July 14.

D.A. Davidson analyst Gil Luria said Meta was investing aggressively in AI as the technology has already boosted its ad business by allowing it to sell more ads and 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 materialise,” Mr Luria said.

In recent weeks, Mr Zuckerberg has personally led an aggressive talent raid for the Meta Superintelligence Labs, which will be led by former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang and ex-GitHub chief Nat Friedman, after Meta invested US$14.3 billion in Scale.

Meta had raised its 2025 capital expenditure to between US$64 billion and US$72 billion in April, aiming to bolster the company’s position against rivals OpenAI and Google. REUTERS