Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has revealed plans to build a 5GW data center, with one cluster alone set to be nearly as big as Manhattan.
Detailing the plans in a social media post this week, Zuckerberg said Meta plans to invest “hundreds of billions” of dollars as part of the move to build out AI infrastructure.
Meta, along with industry competitors, has been ramping up investment in AI infrastructure over the last 18 months, with capital expenditure at the tech giant surging to $68 billion.
The pledge comes as Meta has offered large sums — some in the hundreds of millions — to entice top AI talent away from rivals, successfully poaching staff from Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Safe Superintelligence, among others.
In the last two weeks, reports suggested Meta sought financing of as much as $29bn to fund data centers, and bought 1GW of renewable power as part of the push.
Meta is big on data centers
Writing on Threads, Zuckerberg outlined some of the company's plans when it comes to competing with AI, and in particular developing superintelligence.
OpenAI has long targeted the idea of artificial general intelligence (AGI), and Meta recently launched its own Superintelligence Lab.
"For our superintelligence effort, I'm focused on building the most elite and talent-dense team in the industry," he wrote. "We're also going to invest hundreds of billions of dollars into compute to build superintelligence."
Zuckerberg noted that analyst firm SemiAnalysis reported Meta would be the first lab to bring a 1GW "supercluster" online, but said that Meta is already working to build several multiple-gigawatt data centers.
The first of these will be named Prometheus, he revealed, and is set to come online in 2026.
"We're also building Hyperion, which will be able to scale up to 5GW over several years,” he added. “We're building multiple more titan clusters as well. Just one of these covers a significant part of the footprint of Manhattan."
"Meta Superintelligence Labs will have industry-leading levels of compute and by far the greatest compute per researcher. I'm looking forward to working with the top researchers to advance the frontier!"
Where will the data centers be built?
In New Albany, Ohio, the Prometheus system is a 1GW cluster of data centers using both Meta's own infrastructure and leased systems, according to SemiAnalysis, noting that this means "Meta ramps faster".
It will have two natural gas plants on site, though Prometheus will also use renewable energy.
Hyperion, meanwhile, is in Richland Parish, Louisiana; work started last year, and the first 1.5GW phase is expected to come online next year. It will be powered in part by renewables but also feature natural gas.
The same day that Zuckerberg made his enthusiastic Threads posts, a story in The New York Times described Meta's construction of a $750 million data center in Georgia, highlighting the impact on the local community including local wells going dry.
While a Meta spokesperson disputed the account, the local water authority said the data center uses 10% of the county's total water supply.
Bigger data centers means bigger challenges
The rise in AI has led to a huge increase in data center investment and funding for associated infrastructure.
Earlier this year, the US government unveiled plans for the Stargate Project, a $500 billion scheme aimed at building out AI infrastructure across the United States.
With backing from OpenAI and cloud computing giant Oracle, the project aims to meet projected demand for compute power as enterprises across the country continue ramping up AI adoption.
But with infrastructure investment comes new demands - and concerns. Particularly around the environmental impact and strain placed on energy grids.
A host of big tech companies, including AWS and Microsoft, are investing heavily in nuclear energy to meet expected power demands as a result of their own infrastructure build out.
Indeed, the International Energy Agency said AI will chew through the same amount of energy as Japan by 2030. Google reported earlier this month that its emissions have surged 51% over five years, largely down to AI infrastructure development.
Concerns over energy constraints are also growing on the other side of the Atlantic, with research earlier this year warning that European energy grids might struggle to contend with surging power demands.
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