Meta (META) CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on Monday that the company plans to build several massive data centers across the US, including one it expects to come online next year. The news follows a slew of pricey, high-profile AI hires at Meta.
“Meta Superintelligence Labs will have industry-leading levels of compute and by far the greatest compute per researcher,” Zuckerberg wrote in a post on Threads.
Last month, the social media giant invested $14.3 billion in Scale AI (SCAI.PVT) and brought on its CEO, Alexandr Wang, and hired former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman and Safe Superintelligence CEO Daniel Gross. The company also poached Apple’s head of AI foundation models, Ruoming Pang, according to Bloomberg.
The hires are part of the company’s effort to develop superintelligence, or high-powered AI capabilities that are beyond human intelligence. To do that, Meta has launched its own Superintelligence Lab, pointing to the technology’s importance for the company.
To power all of this, Meta said it is investing hundreds of billions of dollars into the hardware needed to research and run those kinds of AI capabilities. The company said it will bring its 1-gigawatt supercluster data center, called Prometheus, online in 2026.
The company is also building its Hyperion data center, which it says will scale up to 5 gigawatts over the next several years. A gigawatt is 1 billion watts of electricity, enough to power as many as 800,000 homes for a full year.
Meta said Prometheus will be located in New Albany, Ohio, and refers to it as a multiregion data center. Hyperion will be built in Louisiana. That facility, the company explained, will be large enough to cover a large chunk of Manhattan.
Meta is in a race to develop the next generation of AI capabilities, battling rivals including Microsoft-backed OpenAI (OPAI.PVT), Amazon-backed Anthropic (ANTH.PVT), Google (GOOG, GOOGL), Perplexity (PEAI.PVT), and others. The company has faced headwinds more recently as it was forced to delay its latest AI model, Llama 4 Behemoth.
Part of the effort is related to Meta’s desire to break free of its reliance on third-party companies to power its business. Meta’s Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads apps are all subject to Apple’s and Google’s respective app store regulations.
At times, that has limited Meta’s own business plans and expansion efforts. It’s also why the company made its initial push into the metaverse and why it’s investing heavily in its augmented reality glasses.
But so far, the metaverse has been far less successful than Meta’s social apps. Its headsets have sold well but aren’t nearly as ubiquitous as smartphones. And while the Meta Quest AR/VR headset is a standalone platform, the company’s Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses still require users to connect to a smartphone.
AI technologies, however, could give Meta the control over its own destiny that it has sought for so long. But getting there will cost billions, and there’s no guarantee it will ever pay off.
Email Daniel Howley at dhowley@yahoofinance.com. Follow him on X/Twitter at @DanielHowley.
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