Mark Zuckerberg is once again in founder mode. This time it's the AI version.
Meta was delayed in the Generated AI Race, which the company launched its 4 Lama models earlier this year. Compared to the offerings of Deepseek, Openai, Anthropic and Google's rivals, this product didn't end up scratching.
Since then, Zuck has become an employment vendor and personally recruits top AI talent in paid packages, ranging from over $100 million.
This is one factor for success in generating AI. The other is high quality data. So Meta's strange $14 billion deal is just under half of AI and its leader Alex Wang.
The third ingredient you need is infrastructure. This is the technical terminology of data centers required to build, refine and execute AI chips (such as GPUs), networking gear, and giant AI models such as the Llama series.
On Friday, Semiana's Healing put a lid on Zack's big plans for Meta's huge new AI infrastructure. You can read the report here. You have to pay to read everything, but if you're serious about AI, you'll want to fire.
Zuck has reviewed some details of the Semianalysis report via Monday's Facebook post. The CEO said Meta will build several new AI data centers that use more than 1 gigawatt of power each. This is how data center capacity is measured, and everything in the 1 gigawatt range is absolutely huge (or at least up until now).
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Tent Data Center
What really caught my eye with the Semianalysis Report is that Meta is currently building some of these AI data centers in their tents. A Meta spokesperson confirmed this, saying the tents would help the company add additional capabilities to the data center campus, emphasizing that the entire “super cluster” data center facility is not just a tent.
That's good because there are lots of complex and expensive gear in the data center and this gear needs to be kept cool in a truly controlled way. Otherwise it may overheat.
So building a data center portion in a tent is a sign of how fast Zuck is moving to run additional AI computational capacity.
Remember when Elon Musk built a Model 3 car in 2018 in a tent outside the company's Fremont Factory? It's the speed of the market, and Zuck is currently doing this for its data center. You probably get the page from Elon's strategy book.
“Inspired by Xai's unprecedented time to market, Meta embraces data center designs that prioritize speed above all else,” Semianalysis wrote in a report Friday. “They're already building a lot of them! Traditional data centers and real estate investors are somewhat shaking from Xai's Memphis site, and time to the market is once again shocking.”
“From prefabricated power and cooling modules to ultra-light construction, speed is essential,” he added.
This could be a challenge to run the prefabricated portion of these AI data centers, as the tents get very hot. In fact, Semianalysis reported that Meta can stop workloads on the hottest summer days.
Over the long term, Meta could potentially build a complete data center without a tent, but in the short and medium term, the company needs these facilities to be up and run “as soon as possible.”
“Everyone is trying to build data centers as fast as possible in the race to achieve AGI. Due to the restrictions on power, data center capacity and construction crew, Meta has begun to put data centers in 'tents' to reduce construction bottlenecks,” Patel said.
And here's the full post from Zack on Monday:
“For our super-intelligence efforts, I focus on building the most elite and talented teams in the industry. We also invest hundreds of billions of dollars to calculate to build something close. We have capital from our business to do this.
“We're actually building some multi-GW clusters. We call it the first Prometheus. It'll be coming online in 26. We'll also build Hyperion, which can expand up to 5GW over the years.
“Meta Superintelligence Labs has industry-leading level of computing, with the largest computing per researcher. We look forward to working with top researchers to advance the frontier!”
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