Meta (META) is turning up the heat on the AI competition. On Friday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company plans to pour billions more into its artificial intelligence development efforts, construct a massive new data center, and launch its Llama 4 foundation model in the coming months.
Meta stock was up less than 1% following the news.
In a Facebook post, Zuckerberg said the company will significantly ramp up its capital expenditures, saying Meta will pour $60 billion to $65 billion into its expansion plans. That’s an enormous increase from the $38 billion to $40 billion the company said it planned to spend during its 2024 fiscal year.
Meta reports its earnings results on Jan. 29.
In his post, Zuckerberg laid out his expectations for 2025, saying that Meta AI, the company’s AI assistant, will serve more than 1 billion people and that Llama 4 will become the leading, state-of-the-art model. The CEO also said Meta will build an AI engineer that will begin contributing code to the company’s research and development efforts.
A large chunk of Meta’s expansion plan includes building a more than 2-gigawatt data center that Zuckerberg said will be so large it would cover a huge portion of Manhattan. The company plans to have 1 gigawatt worth of construction completed in 2025 and to end the year with a whopping 1.3 million GPUs powering AI development. The company didn’t say where it plans to build the center, however.
Meta is in an AI arms race with its Silicon Valley rivals, as tech companies work to outpace each other in creating ever more powerful AI models. Unlike other companies, Meta’s Llama models are open source, meaning developers can access and adjust the software as they see fit.
Meta’s rivals aren’t sitting still, though. Microsoft (MSFT) and its partner OpenAI continue to push out new AI updates including OpenAI’s new Operator AI agent that can perform tasks via its own browser for you.
And on Tuesday, Oracle (ORCL), OpenAI, and SoftBank announced their Stargate Project, a $500 billion effort to build AI data centers across the US.
Google (GOOG, GOOGL) and Amazon (AMZN), meanwhile, are building out their respective AI platforms while investing billions in OpenAI rival Anthropic. Earlier this week, Google agreed to invest another $1 billion in the company. That builds on the prior $2 billion Google already invested in the firm.
Email Daniel Howley at dhowley@yahoofinance.com. Follow him on Twitter at @DanielHowley.
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