Meta plans to spend up to $65 billion in ‘AI’s defining year,’ says Zuckerberg

Meta Platforms (META) CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company plans to invest between $60 billion and $65 billion in capital spending this year, compared to an estimate of $38 billion to $40 billion in 2024, then that the tech giant is expanding its artificial intelligence efforts.

Meta’s share price rose 1.7% on Friday to close at an all-time high of $647.49 following the announcement, surpassing a record set a day earlier. Shares have gained nearly 65% ​​over the past 12 months.

Zuckerberg said Friday that 2025 “will be a defining year for AI,” in a Facebook post, describing Meta’s intentions to build an AI data center “so big it would cover a significant portion of Manhattan.” . Meta expects the data center to bring 1 gigawatt of computing power online in 2025 and end the year with more than 1.3 million GPU chips.

The CEO’s announcement comes just days after Stargate, the $500 billion AI project announced Tuesday by President Donald Trump, which sent several stocks related to AI and nuclear energy soaring.

Zuckerberg also said he expects Meta AI to serve more than a billion people, thanks to its large Llama 4 language model. In October, Zuckerberg said Llama 4 was “well advanced in its development “, and that smaller models should be launched early this year.

JPMorgan analysts told clients on Friday that they believe Meta AI functionality will increase with Llama 4 this year, with some features similar to those in OpenAI’s Agent Operator AI released on Thursday.