Meta to boost AI efforts with US $65 billion investment

USA – Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced plans to invest between US $60 billion and US $65 billion in capital expenditures this year to significantly expand the company’s artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities.

In a Facebook post on Jan. 24, Zuckerberg described 2025 as a pivotal year for AI and revealed that Meta is building a massive data center capable of covering “a significant part of Manhattan.”

By the end of 2025, Meta will bring online 1 gigawatt of computing power and house over 1.3 million GPUs to support its growing AI initiatives.

This infrastructure will underpin several AI-focused projects, including Meta AI, which Zuckerberg predicts will serve over 1 billion users this year.

He also highlighted the development of Llama 4, anticipated to become the leading state-of-the-art AI model, and a new AI engineer that will contribute to Meta’s R&D efforts.

“This is a massive effort, and over the coming years, it will drive our core products and business, unlock historic innovation, and extend American technology leadership,” Zuckerberg said.

The investment marks a substantial increase in Meta’s capital expenditures, 50% higher than its estimated spending in 2024 and more than double its 2023 investment, according to Bloomberg. Wall Street analysts had initially expected a lower allocation of US $51.3 billion for 2025.

Zuckerberg’s announcement comes amid broader investments in AI infrastructure by other major players.

President Donald Trump recently announced Stargate, a US $500 billion initiative to develop AI-focused data centers in the U.S., backed by SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, and Dubai’s MGX sovereign wealth fund.

Additionally, Amazon Web Services (AWS) disclosed plans to invest at least US $11 billion in Georgia to expand its cloud computing and AI infrastructure,

Furthermore, Microsoft announced a US $80 billion commitment for fiscal 2025 to build AI-powered data centers, describing the moment as a “golden opportunity for American AI.”