Meta announces “Meta Compute” initiative to build AI infrastructure

[BENGALURU] Meta announced its “Meta Compute” initiative to build artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure and oversee global data center and supplier partnerships for social media companies in pursuit of superintelligence.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on Monday (January 12) that the new initiative will be co-led by Santosh Janardhan and Daniel Gross, Meta's global heads of infrastructure.

Zuckerberg said Janardhan will continue to manage Meta's technology infrastructure and data center operations, while Gross will lead a new group focused on strategic capacity planning and business partnerships.

The company will work closely with Dina Powell McCormick, who has joined Meta as president and vice chair, she said in a post on her social media platform Threads.

Meta is accelerating investments in frontier AI and personal superintelligence, a theoretical milestone for machines to surpass humans. Zuckerberg is hard at work building data centers for these projects and energy capacity to support them.

“Meta plans to build tens of gigawatts over the next 10 years, and hundreds of gigawatts or more in the long term,” he said.

Under the new initiative, the massive computing power target would consume as much electricity as a small city, or even a small country, at a time of growing concern over the exploitation of resources such as water.

Meta is struggling in the Silicon Valley AI race due to the poor reception of its Llama 4 model. Facebook's parent company has committed US$72 billion to capital expenditures in 2025.

Meanwhile, Big Tech companies are aiming to secure long-term power supplies as AI and data centers drive U.S. electricity demand to the highest level in 20 years.

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To achieve this goal, Meta has signed 20-year agreements to purchase power from three Vistra nuclear power plants in the central United States and develop projects with two companies that want to build small modular reactors. Reuters