Meta (Meta) CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Monday that the company plans to build several large data centers across the US, including what it expects to go online next year. This news follows a large number of AI adoptions that are expensive and well-known in the meta.
“Meta Superintelligence Labs has industry-leading level of computing, with the largest calculations per researcher,” Zuckerberg wrote in a post about the thread.
Last month, the social media giant invested a $14.3 billion scale AI (SCAI.PVT) to invite CEO Alexandr Wang to hire former Github CEO Nat Friedman and Safe Superintelligence CEO Daniel Gross. According to Bloomberg, the company also poached Ruoming Pang, chief of Aph's AI Foundation Models.
This recruitment is part of the company's efforts to develop convergence beyond human intelligence, or powerful AI capabilities. To that end, Meta has launched its own Superintelligence Lab, pointing out the importance of technology for the company.
To bolster all this, Meta said it is investing hundreds of billions of dollars in the hardware needed to investigate and execute such types of AI capabilities. The company said it will bring a 1 gigawatt supercluster data center called Prometheus online in 2026.
The company also says it is building a Hyperion data center and will expand by up to 5 gigawatts in the coming years. Gigawatts are 1 billion watts of electricity, enough to power 800,000 homes a year.
Meta said Prometheus is located in New Albany, Ohio, and calls it a multi-component data center. The Hyperion will be built in Louisiana. The company explained that the facility will be large enough to cover much of Manhattan.
Meta is taking part in the race to develop next-generation AI capabilities that will compete with rivals including Microsoft-Backed Openai (Opai.pvt), Amazon-Backed Anthropic (Anth.Pvt), Google (Goog, Google), Prplexity (Peai.pvt). The company has been heading for the recent recent as it was forced to delay its latest AI model, the Llama 4 Behemoth.
Part of this effort is related to the meta desire to dismantle third-party businesses and promote business. Meta's Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and threaded apps are all subject to Apple and Google's respective App Store regulations.
Sometimes Meta's own business planning and expansion efforts are limited. That's why the company first pushed it to Metaverse, and why it invested heavily in augmented reality glasses.
But so far, Metaverse has been far less successful than Meta's social app. The headset is well sold, but it's not as ubiquitous as a smartphone. Additionally, while the Meta Quest AR/VR headset is a standalone platform, the company's Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses require users to connect to their smartphones.
