Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Friday that the company plans to build a massive data center in Louisiana to power its new AI model, Llama 4, scheduled to launch this year.
In a Facebook post, Zuckerberg said the company would invest more than $60 billion in AI, including the data center, which he said would be “so big that it would cover a significant portion of Manhattan.”
“This will be a defining year for AI. By 2025, I expect Meta AI to be the leading assistant serving over a billion people, Llama 4 to become the leading edge model, and we’ll build an AI engineer that will start contributing quantities increasing amounts of code to our R&D. efforts,” Zuckerberg wrote.
The project would mark a significant increase in Meta’s capital spending, which was around $38 billion to $40 billion in 2024, Susan Li, Meta’s chief financial officer, previously said. In his Facebook post, Zuckerberg said that despite these significant expenses, the company had “the capital to continue investing in the years to come.”
The announcement comes alongside a surge in investment in AI, with President Donald Trump earlier this week announcing the launch of Project Stargate – an AI infrastructure joint venture with OpenAI, Oracle and Softbank – which aims to form a new company that could include investments of up to $500 billion over the next four years.
The project has attracted the attention of other top tech executives, including SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who found himself in a feud with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman after responding to a X message advertising the company saying that “they don’t actually have the money.” .”
AI technology is a hot topic for many tech companies, with the growing popularity of AI models from companies like OpenAI, Meta, and Anthropic. Nvidia, a company that makes graphics processing units, or GPUs – specialized computer chips used to train AI models – had one of the highest market capitalizations in 2024 and is currently valued at around $3.6 trillion. dollars.
Trump also signed an executive order on Thursday to promote the development of AI technology in the United States, with the stated goal of removing policies that act as “barriers to American innovation in AI” and to develop “AI systems free from ideological or engineering bias”. social agendas.
In Friday’s announcement, Zuckerberg said he expects “Meta AI to be the leading assistant serving more than a billion people” and that “Llama 4 will become the leading edge model.”
With the addition of the data center, he said, the company should finish the year with more than 1.3 million GPUs. Last January, Zuckerberg announced that Meta would buy 350,000 H100 graphics cards from Nvidia, a deal worth billions of dollars.
Zuckerberg had mentioned the data center project last month in an Instagram Reel announcing the release of Meta’s Llama 3.3 model, noting that the center would be used to build “future versions of Llama.” The project will be built in Richland Parish, a rural area in northeast Louisiana with a population of about 19,000, according to census data.
