Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Friday said his company will spend $60-$65 billion this year as it looks to “significantly” expand its artificial intelligence team and services. The investment comes as Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, is battling tech stalwarts like Google and Microsoft and upstart powerhouses like OpenAI for an upper hand in the budding AI industry.
Most of Meta’s investment will go towards data centers — including one so big it would cover a large chunk of Manhattan — to fuel products like Llama, the AI model powering the company’s AI. He did not mention where that data center will be.
“This will be a defining year for AI,” Zuckerberg said in a post on Facebook. “I expect Meta AI will be the leading assistant serving more than 1 billion people, Llama 4 will become the leading state of the art model, and we’ll build an AI engineer that will start contributing increasing amounts of code to our research and development efforts.”
He added that this “massive effort” will “bring online approximately 1 [gigawatt] of compute in ’25 and we’ll end the year with more than 1.3 million [graphic processing units].”
The $60-$65 billion in capital expenditures is a major increase from 2024, when the company spent about $40 billion.
Meta’s investors did not seem upset by the AI investment, at least initially, with the company’s stock price increasing 0.7% in early Friday morning trading. The company is worth $1.62 trillion.
Friday’s announcement comes after Zuckerberg joined a number of other tech CEOs, including OpenAI chief Sam Altman and Tesla boss Elon Musk, at President Donald Trump’s inauguration on Monday.
Zuckerberg, in his Facebook post, said AI will be a central facet of Meta’s business moving forward.
“Over the coming years, [AI] will drive our core products and business, unlock historic innovation and extend American technology leadership,” he wrote, before adding “Let’s go build!” and a flexing arm emoji.
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