Meta (META) CEO Mark Zuckerberg is plowing billions into his company’s AI expansion efforts with the goal of developing so-called superintelligence, or AI that can surpass human capabilities.
In a Threads post on Monday, Zuckerberg revealed plans to spend hundreds of billions of dollars building several massive AI data centers across the US, including one that will come online as soon as next year.
Another data center, called Hyperion, will eventually scale up to support up to 5 gigawatts, or 5 billion watts, of capacity. A gigawatt of electricity can power roughly 800,000 homes.
It’s not just data centers, though. Zuckerberg is also splashing money on high-profile AI hires. In June, Meta invested $14.3 billion in Scale AI and hired its CEO Alexandr Wang. The company also hired former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman and Safe Superintelligence CEO Daniel Gross and poached Apple’s head of AI foundation models, Ruoming Pang, according to Bloomberg.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Meta also snagged OpenAI (OPAI.PVT) researchers Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, and Xiaohua Zhai.
All of this comes as Meta looks to capture the lead in the AI wars after the company was forced to put its Llama 4 Behemoth model on ice while it works to bring its functionality up to par with frontier models from the likes of OpenAI and Google.
“Mr. Zuckerberg believes it’s very important to have one of the leading models,” D.A. Davidson head of technology research Gil Luria told Yahoo Finance.
“He’s rebuilt the team so he has the talent to do it, and he’s going to continue to invest in the compute capacity so he has the compute capacity to achieve it.”
For Meta, it’s a gamble the company can’t afford to lose.
Meta’s AI efforts differ significantly from those at OpenAI, Anthropic (ANTH.PVT), Perplexity (PEAI.PVT), xAI, and even Microsoft (MSFT) and Google (GOOG, GOOGL). Rather than using its technology to explore questions about the universe or power enterprise and cloud-based software services, Zuckerberg said the company is angling to make its AI platform a kind of “personal superintelligence.”
During an interview with The Information’s TITV, Zuckerberg explained that Meta’s personal superintelligence will solve simpler problems for users on a daily basis.
“Our mission with the lab is to deliver personal superintelligence to everyone in the world, so that way we can put that power in every individual’s hand. It’s a different thing than what the other labs are doing. This is going to be something that is the most important technology in our lives.”
