Mark Zuckerberg Says Meta Is Launching Its Own AI Infrastructure Initiative

When Meta shared its capital expenditure outlook last year, the company signalled that it was prepared to invest heavily in expanding the infrastructure needed to support its artificial intelligence ambitions. During an earnings call last summer, Meta CFO Susan Li said the company believed that building leading AI infrastructure would be a critical advantage in developing advanced AI models and products.

Meta now appears to be following through on that plan. On Monday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the launch of Meta Compute, a new initiative to strengthen the company’s AI infrastructure significantly. Zuckerberg said the effort will involve a significant expansion of Meta’s energy footprint over the coming years.

“Meta is planning to build tens of gigawatts this decade, and hundreds of gigawatts or more over time,” Zuckerberg said in a post on Threads. “How we engineer, invest, and partner to build this infrastructure will become a strategic advantage.”

A gigawatt represents one billion watts of electrical power, and the growing energy demands of AI could drive a sharp increase in overall electricity consumption in the United States over the next decade. Some estimates suggest demand tied to AI could rise from roughly 5 gigawatts today to as much as 50 gigawatts in the future.

Zuckerberg named three senior leaders who will oversee the Meta Compute initiative. One is Santosh Janardhan, Meta’s head of global infrastructure, who has been with the company since 2009. Janardhan will lead efforts spanning technical architecture, software systems, silicon development, developer productivity, and the construction and operation of Meta’s global data centre fleet and network.

Another key figure is Daniel Gross, who joined Meta last year. Gross is the co-founder of Safe Superintelligence, alongside former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever. At Meta, Gross will head a new group responsible for long-term capacity planning, supplier partnerships, industry analysis, strategic planning, and business modelling.

The third executive involved is Dina Powell McCormick, a former government official who recently joined Meta. Zuckerberg said she will work closely with governments to help build, deploy, invest in, and finance the company’s infrastructure projects.

Meta’s move comes amid a broader industry-wide push to develop cloud environments capable of supporting large-scale generative AI workloads. Capital spending projections announced last year showed that many of Meta’s competitors share similar goals. Microsoft, for example, has been actively partnering with AI infrastructure providers. At the same time, Alphabet announced the acquisition of data centre firm Intersect in December as part of its infrastructure expansion.