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The race for AI dominance has officially entered a new phase. On Monday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the launch of “Meta Compute”. This new initiative aims to drastically bolster the tech giant’s AI infrastructure and expand its energy footprint.
Zuckerberg revealed the news in a post on Threads. He stated clearly that Meta plans to build tens of gigawatts of capacity this decade. Furthermore, the company targets hundreds of gigawatts over time. Zuckerberg noted:
How we engineer, invest, and partner to build this infrastructure will become a strategic advantage.
View on Threads
This move fulfils a promise made last summer. During an earnings call, Meta CFO Susan Li projected heavy capital expenditure. She emphasised that leading AI infrastructure would be a “core advantage” for the company’s future products.
The Power Play
The scale of this project is immense. For context, one gigawatt equals a billion watts. Current estimates suggest America’s total electrical consumption for AI could jump from 5 GW to 50 GW over the next decade. Meta intends to capture a massive slice of that power.
Consequently, the industry is witnessing a fierce race to build generative AI-ready cloud environments. Microsoft is aggressively partnering with infrastructure providers. Similarly, Google’s parent company, Alphabet, acquired data centre firm Intersect in December. Meta is now positioning itself to lead this pack.
Meta Compute: The New War Room
To spearhead Meta Compute, Zuckerberg has assembled a specific leadership trio.
Santosh Janardhan, the current head of global infrastructure, will lead the technical side. A Meta veteran since 2009, Janardhan handles the software stack, silicon program, and the global data centre fleet.
Daniel Gross joins to lead a new group within Meta. The co-founder of Safe Superintelligence and former partner of Ilya Sutskever, Gross will focus on long-term capacity strategy and supplier partnerships.
Dina Powell McCormick, Meta’s president and vice chairman, takes charge of the external strategy. As a former government official, she will work with governments to finance and deploy this massive infrastructure network.
Meta is betting big on energy. With this dedicated team and billions in projected investment, Zuckerberg is ensuring his AI models won’t starve for power.
