Meta to spend up to $65 bln this year to power AI goals, Zuckerberg says

 Meta to spend up to $65 bln this year to power AI goals, Zuckerberg says

Mark Zuckerberg arrives before the inauguration of Donald Trump as the 47th president of the United States takes place inside the Capitol Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C., Monday, January 20, 2025. Kenny Holston/Pool via REUTERS/File Photo

Jan 24 (Reuters) - Meta Platforms plans to spend between $60 billion and $65 billion this year to build out AI infrastructure, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on Friday, joining a wave of Big Tech firms unveiling hefty investments to capitalize on the technology.

As part of the investment, Meta (META.O), opens new tab will build a more than 2-gigawatt data center that would be large enough to cover a significant part of Manhattan. The company — one of the largest customers of Nvidia's (NVDA.O), opens new tab coveted artificial intelligence chips — plans to end the year with more than 1.3 million graphics processors.

"This will be a defining year for AI," Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post. "This is a massive effort, and over the coming years it will drive our core products and business."

Zuckerberg expects Meta's AI assistant — available across its services, including Facebook and Instagram — to serve more than 1 billion people in 2025, while its open-source Llama 4 would become the "leading state-of-the-art model".

Shares of the company were 1.6% higher in early trading.

Big technology companies have been investing tens of billions of dollars to develop AI-related infrastructure after the meteoric success of OpenAI's ChatGPT highlighted the potential for the technology.

U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday announced that OpenAI, SoftBank Group (9984.T), opens new tab and Oracle (ORCL.N), opens new tab will form a venture called Stargate and invest $500 billion in AI infrastructure across the United States.

Earlier this month, Microsoft said it was planning to invest about $80 billion in fiscal 2025 to develop data centers, while Amazon.com (AMZN.O), opens new tab has said its capital spending for 2025 would be higher than an estimated $75 billion in 2024.

Meta's planned capital spending of up to $65 billion would mark a significant jump from its estimated capital spending of $38 billion to $40 billion for last year.

As part of the AI efforts, the company said it would build an AI engineer that will start contributing increasing amounts of code to its research and design efforts. It will also continue to grow the teams working on AI services.