Mark Zuckerberg is ready to drop up to $65 billion on AI this year

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Mark Zuckerberg at UFC 298 on February 17, 2024 in Anaheim, California. - Photo: Chris Unger/Zuffa LLC (Getty Images)
Mark Zuckerberg at UFC 298 on February 17, 2024 in Anaheim, California. - Photo: Chris Unger/Zuffa LLC (Getty Images)

Mark Zuckerberg is ready to put tens of billions of dollars toward making Meta (META) an artificial intelligence leader this year.

The Meta chief executive said the tech giant is planning to invest between $60 billion and $65 billion in capital expenditures on AI in 2025, in a Facebook post on Friday. Zuckerberg said he expects Meta AI to “be the leading assistant serving more than 1 billion people” this year. He added that Meta’s Llama 4 model is expected to “become the leading state of the art model” this year, and that the company plans to “build an AI engineer” that can contribute more code to its research and development efforts.

To power its AI plans, Zuckerberg said Meta is building a data center with a capacity of more than two gigawatts — a site that could cover a large part of Manhattan.

“We’ll bring online ~1GW of compute in ‘25 and we’ll end the year with more than 1.3 million GPUs,” Zuckerberg said.

The company plans to “significantly” grow its AI teams, he said, and has “the capital to continue investing in the years ahead.”

Earlier this month, Meta — which operates Facebook, Instagram, and Reality Labs (formerly Oculus VR) — sent a message to company managers about reducing headcount by 5%, or about 3,600 jobs, Bloomberg reported. The cuts are aimed at “low-performers” who will reportedly be replaced later in the year.

“We typically manage out people who aren’t meeting expectations over the course of a year, but now we’re going to do more extensive performance-based cuts during this cycle,” Zuckerberg reportedly said in the internal message.

Meanwhile, Zuckerberg has introduced new company policies, such as cutting back on moderation and scrapping the platform’s fact-checking system, as he’s grown closer with the Trump administration. In December, Meta donated $1 million to the president-elect’s inaugural fund.

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