AI race: Meta announces the construction of data centers in the gigawatt range

Meta is planning to build several huge data centers with several gigawatts (GW) of computing power. This was announced by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Monday. This is intended to drive forward the US company's ambitions in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). The first of these data centers is expected to go into operation next year.

"We are currently building several multi-GW clusters. We're calling the first one Prometheus and it will be operational in '26," Zuckerberg wrote in a post on the Meta short messaging service Threads. "We're also building Hyperion, which can scale to 5 GW over several years. We're also building several more Titan clusters. One of them alone covers a significant portion of the area of Manhattan," Zuckerberg continued. This refers to a plant in Richland Parish in the US state of Louisiana, which is said to be almost as large as Manhattan.

Meta invests billions in the AI race

Meta has been investing heavily in energy projects, computing power and brains in the AI competition for some time now. In April, the company announced plans to spend up to 72 billion US dollars on investments this year – with a focus on AI and data centers. For example, Meta recently paid USD 14.3 billion for a 49% stake in Scale AI, a company that processes data for AI training, among other things. In addition, Scale AI co-founder Alexandr Wang was hired as Chief AI Officer. In recent months, Meta has also poached numerous top AI experts from competitors such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Apple and Safe Superintelligence. Salaries of up to 100 million US dollars are reportedly being paid over several years. The AI experts are to build up the newly founded meta-team Superintelligence Labs. AI superintelligence is a kind of step towards Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). This next-generation AI requires even more computing power, which is why the expansion of data centers is becoming increasingly important.

"In our superintelligence efforts, I am focused on building the best and most talented team in the industry. We will also invest hundreds of billions of dollars in computing to build superintelligence. We have the capital from our business to do this," Zuckerberg wrote on Monday. Meta has the advantage of being able to cross-subsidize the entire AI business. The social media group earns the money with other business models, primarily advertising on the social networks Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. "The Meta Superintelligence Labs will have an industry-leading level of computing power and by far the most computing power per researcher," Zuckerberg continued.

(akn)