Meta Platforms Inc. chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has revealed plans for an expansive new wave of data centres designed to support the company’s ambitious artificial intelligence (AI) vision, with the first facility, dubbedPrometheus, expected to go live in 2026.
In a post shared on Threads, Meta’s social media platform, Zuckerberg saidPrometheus, located in Ohio, will be the first in a series of “titan clusters,” vast data centre complexes intended to meet the enormous energy and computational demands of next-generation AI models. He described these facilities as“multi-gigawatt clusters”, making them among the largest in the world.
The announcement underlines Meta’s growing investment in AI infrastructure, part of its broader strategy to develop “superintelligence”, an advanced form of AI that could outperform humans in a wide range of tasks. According to Zuckerberg, the company intends to spend“hundreds of billions of dollars” on these efforts, signalling a long-term commitment to lead the global AI race.
Notably, the scale of the infrastructure is unprecedented. Meta’s largest data centre, currently under construction in Richland Parish, Louisiana, is said to be nearly the size of Manhattan. By comparison, most existing data centres operate with only a few hundred megawatts of capacity. Meta’s upcoming facilities aim to cross the one-gigawatt threshold, enough energy to power around 900,000 homes annually, marking a new benchmark in data processing power.
Meta’s aggressive expansion comes amid growing industry competition. Other major tech players, including OpenAI and Oracle, are also investing in large-scale data centre projects to keep up with the soaring computational needs of generative AI models. Analyst group SemiAnalysis has forecasted that Meta may be the first to achieve a “supercluster” exceeding one gigawatt of capacity.
Zuckerberg’s renewed focus on AI follows internal frustrations with the company’s previous performance in the field. Over recent months, he has personally recruited a formidable team of AI experts, poaching talent from rivals such as OpenAI and Google DeepMind. Among the high-profile additions is Alexandr Wang, co-founder of Scale AI, who now serves as Meta’s Chief AI Officer following a $14.3 billion investment for a 49 per cent stake in his company.
Other notable hires include former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, AI entrepreneur Daniel Gross, and ex-Apple engineer Ruoming Pang, who reportedly joined Meta with a compensation package exceeding $200 million.
Despite these significant capital outlays, Meta’s core advertising business across Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger continues to fuel robust revenue growth, giving the company confidence to fund its AI ambitions internally.
(With inputs from Bloomberg)
