When Meta announced its capital expenditure projections last year, the company made it clear it planned to spend heavily to build capacity for its AI business. Susan Li, Meta’s CFO, stated during an earnings call that developing leading AI infrastructure would be a core advantage in creating the best AI models and product experiences.
Now, the tech giant appears to be making good on that promise. CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently announced the launch of Meta Compute, a new initiative designed to bolster the company’s AI infrastructure. Zuckerberg stated that Meta intends to drastically expand its energy footprint in the coming years.
Zuckerberg explained that Meta is planning to build tens of gigawatts of capacity this decade, and hundreds of gigawatts or more over time. He believes how the company engineers, invests, and partners to build this infrastructure will become a strategic advantage. For reference, a gigawatt is a measurement of electrical power equivalent to one billion watts. The energy demands of AI mean America’s electrical consumption could spike significantly over the next decade, with one estimate suggesting a jump from 5 gigawatts to 50.
Zuckerberg named three executives to spearhead the new project. Santosh Janardhan, the company’s head of global infrastructure, will lead work on technical architecture, software, silicon programs, developer productivity, and operating the global data center fleet and network.
Also involved is Daniel Gross, who joined Meta last year. Gross is the co-founder of Safe Superintelligence alongside former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever. Zuckerberg said Gross will lead a new group responsible for long-term capacity strategy, supplier partnerships, industry analysis, planning, and business modeling.
Finally, Dina Powell McCormick, a former government official who recently joined Meta as president and vice chairman, will be responsible for working with governments to help build, deploy, invest in, and finance Meta’s infrastructure.
There is an obvious race to build generative AI-ready cloud environments. Capital expenditure projections announced last year showed most of Meta’s peers had similar ambitions. Microsoft has been busy partnering with AI infrastructure providers, and Google’s parent company Alphabet recently announced the acquisition of a data center firm called Intersect Power.