Meta’s founder Mark Zuckerberg has said the social media giant will spend hundreds of billions of dollars on building huge AI data centres in the US.<\/p>\n
The first multi-gigawatt data centre, called Prometheus, is expected to come online in 2026, Zuckerberg said.<\/p>\n
He said one of the sites would cover an area nearly the size of Manhattan (59.1 sq km\/22.8 sq miles).<\/p>\n
Meta has invested heavily in efforts to develop what it called “superintelligence” – technology that it said could out-think the smartest humans.<\/p>\n
The company, which has made most of its money from online advertising, generated more than $160bn in revenue in 2024.<\/p>\n
In a post on his social media platform, Threads, Zuckerberg said Meta was building several multi-gigawatt clusters, and that one cluster, called Hyperion, could scale up to five gigawatts over several years.<\/p>\n
“We’re building multiple more titan clusters as well. Just one of these covers a significant part of the footprint of Manhattan,” he added.<\/p>\n
Prometheus will be built in New Albany, Ohio, while Hyperion will be built in Louisiana and is expected to be fully online by 2030, Zuckerberg said.<\/p>\n
He said Meta would “invest hundreds of billions of dollars… to build superintelligence” and that the centres had been given “names befitting their scale and impact”.<\/p>\n
Karl Freund, principal analyst at Cambrian AI Research, told the BBC, “clearly, Zuckerberg intends to spend his way to the top of the AI heap”.<\/p>\n
“The talent he is hiring will have access to some of the best AI Hardware in the world,” Freund added.<\/p>\n
Meta shares were trading 1% higher following the announcement, Reuters news agency reported. The stock has risen more than 20% so far this year.<\/p>\n
There are at least 10,000 data centres around the world hosting the cloud –\u00a0remote servers that store digital information – with most of them located in the US, followed by the UK and Germany. <\/p>\n
AI-driven data centres are extremely energy and water intensive. One study estimates that these centres could consume 1.7 trillion gallons of water globally by 2027. A single AI query – for example, a request to ChatGPT – can use about as much water as a small bottle you’d buy from the corner shop<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Meta’s founder Mark Zuckerberg has said the social media giant will spend hundreds of billions of dollars on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":10824,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[182,181,507,74],"class_list":["post-10823","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10823","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10823"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10823\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10824"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10823"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10823"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10823"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}