Zuckerberg Says Meta To Build Several Gigawatt-Size Data Centers

Meta Platforms Inc. Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg said the company is building several massive data centers to power its artificial intelligence efforts with the first one expected to come online next year.

“We’re calling the first one Prometheus and it’s coming online in ‘26,” Zuckerberg said in a post on his social platform Threads on Monday. “We’re building multiple more titan clusters as well. Just one of these covers a significant part of the footprint of Manhattan.”

Frustrated by the quality of Meta’s past AI efforts, Zuckerberg has been building a team of experts over the last several weeks to achieve artificial general intelligence — or AGI, the notion that machines can perform as well as humans at many tasks. The new Meta Superintelligence Labs team includes researchers poached from OpenAI, Google’s DeepMind and other top AI companies. Meta recently tapped Scale AI co-founder Alexandr Wang as chief AI officer by taking a 49% stake in his firm worth $14.3 billion.

Zuckerberg described the data centers under development as multi-gigawatt “clusters,” which would rank them among the largest in the world. While most data centers today house only hundreds of megawatts of capacity each, several AI and major technology companies including OpenAI and Oracle Corp. are involved in plans to develop ones capable of handling several gigawatts. In his post, Zuckerberg cited SemiAnalysis as saying Meta is on track to be the first with a “supercluster” that houses more than a gigawatt of capacity.

Meta’s shares gained 1.1% to $725.30 on the news.

In April, Meta announced it could spend as much on $72 billion, with a focus on AI and data center investments. In his post on Monday, he said the company is going to invest “hundreds of billions of dollars” into data-center capacity to build superintelligence. “We have the capital from our business to do this,” he said.

Meta, which makes the vast majority of its revenue from advertising on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger, has continued to see year-over-year growth in sales.